Victoria,
Mazel Tov indeed. Like you, I also hated this movie. Unlike you, I don’t feel like I’ve been robbed of any right to righteous anger. On the contrary, it is exactly a film like P.S. I Love You that warrants a very particular form of aggravation.
You noted that P.S. I Love You is clearly the work of a human mind and couldn’t possibly have been assembled to further corporate interests. I totally agree, and it is because of this that the movie becomes irritating. Because someone (Richard LaGravenese) made choice after choice after choice, thinking, I presume, that he was saying something worth saying. Something, I presume, about the way relationships work. Or the way grief happens. Or the way people move on after hardship. Instead of accomplishing this in any way, shape or form, LaGravenese has produced a film about narcissists wearing hats.
The hats in the film are quite nice, by the way. P.S. I Love You is credited by some in the fashion world with popularizing the Cloche hat. To quote Morgan Cullen of Runway Daily, “What I do want to do here is point out here is [sic] Swank’s UBER cute head-wear throughout the entire movie.”
Hats aside, the infantile self-involvement of the characters, particularly Swank’s Holly, becomes difficult to watch after only a few minutes of screen time. The film opens with Holly frustrated with husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) because he mentioned to her mother that she wasn’t ready to have children. The problems with this scene are numerous. To begin with, it is in no way endearing that she is furious with him for saying something that, it becomes clear, she in no way indicated she didn’t want him to say. She’s just upset to be upset. Gerry, rather that attempting genuine communication with his wife, eggs her on and antagonizes her, fueling her distemper. It quickly becomes apparent that he, too, has the emotional capacities of an elementary-aged child. The film implies that via this scene, the first and most important time we see Holly and Gerry alive together, we are supposed to somehow intuit the depth of their love for each other.
Instead I intuited that: A. Holly and Gerry need couple’s counseling, and B. Writer/Director LaGravenese doesn’t understand how feelings work.
The emotional tone-deafness of the film carries on from this point, and the viewer is treated to a slew of scenes that don’t feel quite right. We get to see a funeral wake in which everyone is laughing, smiling, and having a good time. We see Holly embark on a faux-romance with the quasi-autistic Harry Connick, Jr., and are encouraged to think this is cute. Most disturbingly, she has a one-night-stand with husband doppelgänger and (surprise!) husband’s childhood friend William (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). This is supposed to be romantic. The movie’s overall out-of-stepness with anything remotely human makes it the source of well-deserved frustration. This is, after all, a work of art, made by a real human being. A human being, it should be noted, who has committed his life to creating art, and has occasionally done so with aplomb (as you mentioned, The Fisher King and A Little Princess). To see something come from the same creative mind, but fall so tremendously far from those marks, is maddening.
Love,
Adam
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