Adam,
It finally happened. The first bad movie in the box. Mazel Tov to us both!
This is a movie too easy to hate, thereby robbing its viewers of even the righteous pleasure of hating it. Getting worked up about P.S. I Love You is akin to being violently opposed to one’s local chapter of the John Birch Society: a dutiful, ultimately unsatisfying and ineffectual exercise in self-congratulations.
And yet, in spite of all that, here I find myself, performing my blessed American duty in hating this movie. Adam, I really hated this movie. I really did. I hated its vacant heroine and her insipid friends. Hated her stupid ghost husband and his bizarrely cooing yet tepid love notes (“A disco diva must always look her best!”).
What’s simultaneously consoling and disconcerting about the whole thing is the slowly-dawning realization that this film could not be anything but the product of a human mind. It is too inefficient and scattershot, too impulsive in its interests and too meandering in its plot construction, to have been assembled by committee. There’s the snaps game, which in a more coherent film could have been a unique character- or narrative-illuminating detail, but here only registers as pointless quirk. There’s Lisa Kudrow’s speech about the male vs. female gaze, whose sentiment—however legitimate—feels cheapened by its being so out-of-place in the rest of the movie (“After centuries of men looking at my tits instead of my eyes…, I now have the divine right to stare at a man’s backside with vulgar, cheap appreciation if I want to!”). There’s Harry Connick, Jr.’s character whose apparent autism is dismayingly both a point of emphasis and also completely extraneous to the plot. There’s Hillary Swank’s mourning widow wailing along to Judy Garland in a scene that should have been about feeling pathetic, but instead is just itself pathetic.
And so on and so on throughout the film. Where it hopes to be idiosyncratic it ends up being inexplicable. Where it aims for emotional complexity it lands instead at crass insensitivity. There are too many examples of movies that have successfully blended humor, romance, and realism to let P.S. I Love You off with a pat on the back and a “good try.” Think Richard Linklater’s Before series. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Think When Harry Met Sally. Heck, think Ghost, which for all its preposterousness at least possessed a core of genuine human longing.
Even more unfortunate than the mere badness of the film is maybe what it suggests about its intended audience. Do real flesh-and-blood women actually enjoy watching this nonsense? Do they appreciate being made to seem like air-headed puppets blundering through life without the direction given by a man? Do they really see themselves as empty little baubles who are most likely to achieve premium spiritual satisfaction through shoes? Do men receive any satisfaction in believing that women are this stupid? One especially excruciating scene on a boat executes the neat hat trick of making the characters, the creators of those characters, and the audience all look like idiots for taking part in the spectacle.
P.S. I Love You is the box wine of romantic comedies: cheaply made, apathetically consumed, and ideally meant to be paired with a lot of crying. Richard LaGravenese, the director and co-screenwriter, has authored a lot of competent scripts and worked with a lot of more-than-competent directors, among them The Fisher King with Terry Gilliam and A Little Princess with Alphonso Cuarón. I wouldn’t want my worst efforts held against me forever either, but some acknowledgement of wrongdoing here would have been nice.
Love,
Victoria
P.S….
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