...it's one that probably reads better than it comes off on screen.
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The last few times we've seen Hilary Swank on screen she was winning Academy Awards in "Boys Don't Cry" (1999) and "Million Dollar Baby" (2004) and then doing her best to help us forget she won Oscars by making "Black Dahlia" (2006) and "The Reaping" (2007). With other films like "Insomnia" (2002), "Freedom Writers" (2007), and now the romantic semi-comedy "P.S. I Love You" (2007) on Blu-ray, she is certainly in no danger of Hollywood typecasting.
Nor has co-star Gerard Butler done any less varied work in the past few years. Consider "Mrs. Brown" (1997), "Dracula 2000" (2000), "Reign of Fire" (2002), "Dear Frankie" (2004, and his best film to date), "The Phantom of the Opera" (2004), and "300" (2006).
Based on the best-selling 2004 novel by Cecilia Ahern, "P.S. I Love You" does what every romance and romantic comedy strives to do to survive: It provides a gimmick. Sure, it might have been better to provide more romance and more honest humor, but a gimmick's a gimmick, and you gotta have one. In this instance, the gimmick is pretty simple. A married couple--an Irish-born man named Gerry Kennedy (Butler) and his American-born Irish wife Holly (Swank)--are very much in love. Then, after nine years of marriage, Gerry dies of a brain tumor. OK, not the sunniest way to begin a romantic film. But wait. Here's the gimmick: Before he died, he wrote a series of letters to Holly, detailing how she should live her life to the fullest after he's gone, and these letters mysteriously show up intermittently for a year or more after his passing.
Frankly, I found the death of a loved one pretty depressing, even in high definition. Worse, I thought the idea of a dead loved one directing another person's life more than a little creepy. If you can get by those two hurdles, though, you're halfway home. I say "halfway" because the final hurdle is the movie itself, which doesn't offer a lot of possibilities. Basically, what you've got is Gerry speaking from the grave to tell Holly what she ought to do for herself, like celebrate, shop, go to a karaoke bar, and visit Ireland. And that's about it. There is little character development and even less story arc, except at the very end where everything changes abruptly.
After about ten or fifteen minutes of showing us Gerry and Holly's marriage, the movie tells us that Gerry died. Then we get what seems like an eternity of Holly's moping around and carrying Gerry's urn of ashes with her wherever she goes. When on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday Holly receives a cake from her deceased husband, it's downright weird and tends to encapsulate what seems to me an oddly depressing "romantic" film.
I'm sure Ms. Ahern intended her story idea in the spirit of love and good will, and apparently book lovers adored it because the novel sold quite a few copies. But as a movie, it didn't translate well to the screen. It comes off merely as a series of bizarre, melancholy experiences about a young woman who has suffered a tragic loss in her life and wants everyone to know it. To me, that's not much of a subject for light comedy or romance, but I suppose that's the beauty of the gimmick. It's a movie about the unexpected, a movie about the unique and the fascinating. Still, that doesn't make it any the less morbid. The letters, which arrive enigmatically, and all conclude with the line "P.S. I Love You," do buck up Holly's spirits, if not ours. As I say, the filmmakers mean well, but instead of a celebration of life, the whole thing seems like an extended wake.
This is not, however, to suggest that there aren't a few good things mixed in with the mediocre. Certainly, the acting is first rate, with Swank and Butler caught up in a story that seems much too lightweight, even empty, for their talents. Poor Butler has to do most of his acting as a flashback memory. Likewise, Lisa Kudrow and Gena Gershon as Holly's best friends give it their best but seem at a loss for anything much to do. Kathy Bates plays Holly's mother and, and while she is quite persuasive, she adds another layer of grief to the proceedings, her character a bitter, angry woman who appears to hate all men after her husband walked out on her and her children. About the only actor who has a good time is Harry Connick, Jr. as a socially maladjusted bartender. He's the best part of the show, and all of his scenes have a spark of vitality about them, if peculiar and perplexing, that's sorely missing from the rest of the film.
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