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''What do you want? I know what I want, cause I'm holding it in my hands.''
A young widow discovers that her late husband has left her 10 messages intended to help ease her pain and start a new life.
Hilary Swank: Holly
P.S. I Love You is obviously someone trying to be clever and original, but ends up being boring and depressing. It is, throughout, simply, awkward. Scenes drag themselves out without apparent purpose or design. Characters and actors all seem to be coming from T.V. Series, making it feel like something at home on Hallmark rather than the big screen. (I spotted three Actors from three series) Lines of dialogue seem to be melodramatic and unintentionally romanticized.
You don't know whether the filmmaker's goal was to create a heartwarming bonding of love or a gut-wrenching battle of two estranged lovers. Hillary Swank is especially out of place in these murky happenings, feeling like she must be doing a film in a studio next door and just visiting the set of this film.
I spent the time after watching it, wondering how so many talented people could have made such a mess. The stars are fine. We know these people and we know what they can do: Kathy Bates and Hillary Swank are Oscar winners, for example.
''We're so arrogant, aren't we? So afraid of age, we do everything we can to prevent it. We don't realize what a privilege it is to grow old with someone. Someone who doesn't drive you to commit murder or doesn't humiliate you beyond repair.''
The biggest problems are the script and the directing. The script is soulless. Not a single believable, consistent character emerges from this squalid affair. Holly, the lead, (Swank), is, by rotations, depicted as a resentful, frustrated shrew, a nature girl dopey hippy, and a high-heeled shoe fetishist. Kathy Bathes, the mom, is depicted as hating her son-in-law and railing against her daughter, and then is shown to have done something kindly that goes against everything we were told about her.
Not only does the script not make sense, there are scenes that are downright cringe-inducing. Characters that the viewer knows should not be kissing kiss, characters we are supposed to like behave like temperamental, shallow block heads. The main premise – that a man dictates his wife's life after his death is downright creepy, unnatural and sickening.
So, what happened to Richard Lagravenese, who has written great scripts in the past? My best evaluation being neither he nor anybody else involved has any respect for the potential for excellence in a movie about women.
Women whom are cut and pasted unto a series of scenes that they thought would get the ladies to cry and sigh.
Oh, here we need a kiss. Ladle a kiss in here. Okay, here we need a catfight between girlfriends. Tick off said fight. Okay, here we need a poignant mother-daughter moment. Let's rewrite a scene from Terms of Endearment and place it in here.
Look – some people are saying that loving or hating this movie is about the difference between men and women. Don't believe them. P.S. I Love You is a simply awful movie adaptation of a book trying something done alot better previously, thus an insult to its intended female audience. If you want to see a good chick flick, there are plenty out there, that are as intelligent as anything, made for men. Don't tell me that this movie's abysmal quality is the fault of women. Rather, it's the fault of treating women, and art made for women, with complete disrespect.
''It's been a year. I don't feel him anymore. I feel he's gone. He's really gone!''
5/10
