There are moments sometimes when I know I'm watching a bad movie. I stare blankly at the screen, not exactly sure how I'm supposed to be reacting. I kind of fidget in my seat, all the while feeling trapped. I try to calm myself down and think of the positives. I try to ask myself is it really that bad? It did not bode well for P.S. I Love You that I was asking myself this during it's opening scene. The first 10 minutes of the film is devoted to an argument between a young married couple. The wife, Holly (Hillary Swank) is accusing her husband, Gerry (Gerard Butler), of saying the wrong thing to her mother during a dinner party they've just come home from. The argument they have sounds like no argument ever in recorded history. It is too rehearsed. The characters are talking too quickly, and they know just how to respond without any pause or thought. Every word they say sounds forced and scripted, even the angry one-liners they throw back and forth to each other that sounds like something out of a lame sitcom. They storm out opposite sides of the room, and then seconds later, they're embracing and making passionate love. The scene goes on for what seems like forever, and it just gave me a sour taste in my mouth. It wasn't funny, it was annoying. Here I was watching two actors I had admired in past films forced to act like screaming idiots and recite dialogue that was far beneath their talents. Then the opening credits started, and I realized I was going to be in for one very long movie. If only I knew how right I was.

After the credits are over, we flash forward an unknown amount of time later, and we discover that the husband Gerry has died of a brain tumor, and all of his friends have gathered at an Irish pub to mourn and remember him. Rather than focus on the grieving wife, the scene instead mostly focuses on Holly's best girlfriend, Denise (Lisa Kudrow), who decides to use the funeral of her best friend's husband as a way to pick up guys. She walks up to various guys, and asks them a series of questions. First she asks if they're single. Then if they're gay. Then if they have a job. This scene is repeated over and over again as she tries it out with various guys there to mourn Gerry. Once again, the scene gave the wrong impression to me. Shouldn't this scene be about Holly, or maybe tell us a little bit about this Gerry guy who we only met 10 minutes ago, and has suddenly died without warning? So, what about Holly, you ask? The death of her husband has hit her so hard that she locks herself in her apartment, not talking to anyone, and takes solace in old Bette Davis and Judy Garland movies. Her mother (Kathy Bates) and friends soon intervene, and take her out for her birthday, thinking she needs to rejoin the outside world after shutting herself away. Where do they take her? They take her to a trendy gay bar. Because that's where any mother would take their grieving recluse of a daughter.

For some reason, getting drunk at a gay bar with her friends, and throwing up on the nice guy who's concerned and not-so-secretly interested in Holly (Harry Connick Jr.) doesn't seem to help the hurt she is feeling inside after losing her husband. That's when a mysterious birthday present is delivered to Holly's apartment. It's a cake and a mini tape recorder from her husband, Gerry. Apparently during the short time before he died, he set up a program where Holly will receive a series of letters with tasks that are supposed to help her move on with her life without him. The tasks start out simple, such as getting rid of his stuff from the closet so that she'll have more room for herself. But, pretty soon, he's asking her to buy a sexy outfit and wear it while singing at a bar. He's even arranged an all expense paid trip for Holly and her girlfriends to Ireland, so that she can have a chance encounter with a cute guy. This must have taken a lot of careful planning and calculating to plan this out, and let everything go off without a hitch. Given the unreliability of the postal service, I imagine it took some sort of small miracle to have everything mailed to Holly on the exact day he planned them to be. Of course, we're not supposed to ask questions like that. We're supposed to be swept away in the romantic fantasy of the premise, and not talk about such silly things such as logic.

I'm capable of believing a lot of things while watching a movie, but I absolutely refused to be taken in by the sappy, sub-moronic drivel that makes up a majority of P.S. I Love You. Director and co-writer Richard LaGravenese (Freedom Writers) tries to blend romantic melodrama with generic sitcom humor, and the end result is a movie that is impossible to like. It's a movie that often switches tone, often numerous times in the same scene. The scene will start out sad and sappy, then Holly's girlfriends will come barging in, and start cracking sex jokes. Then as soon as they leave, the mood turns somber again, only to once again have someone start throwing one-liners. This is such a confused and utterly stupid movie, I often couldn't believe what I was watching. Even the movie's very structure is questionable. Why does the movie expect us to care about and relate with Nancy's feelings of remorse to her husband when they don't even bother to truly tell us what their relationship was like? Aside from the previously mentioned argument scene that takes place before the opening credits, Gerry only appears as a figment of Holly's imagination, or in brief flashbacks that don't really add to much. There was a very good drama released a couple months ago called Things We Lost in the Fire that dealt with a wife's complex feelings about losing her husband and moving on in a very intelligent and thoughtful manner. Hardly anyone saw that movie, but if they were to watch this movie and that one back to back, it'd be a perfect example of how to and how not to handle such a subject in your movie.

That the movie has absolutely nothing to say about relationships or moving on is quite odd considering it is the very basis of the movie. The screenplay would much rather throw music montages, and desperate comic situations such as when Holly and her girlfriends are out on a boat, lose their oars, and are forced to just sit there and wait for help. So much of the humor is of the TV sitcom variety, an off camera laugh track would not be out of place in this movie. The girlfriends talk like the "wacky neighbor" character, everyone has some snappy response to any comments that is made, and not one single scene or emotion is genuine. To be fair, the movie flirts with some possible honesty during the scenes between Holly and her mother late in the film. Kathy Bates gives the character of Holly's mom some warmth and much needed humanity that everyone else in the movie seems to lack. When she's talking to her daughter about moving on, or about her own experiences of losing the man she loved (her husband walked out on her), her performance lets go of all the artificialness that everything else in the movie has. Compare her dialogue in those scenes compared to almost every other scene in the movie. She talks like a real person, and doesn't sound like she's reading her lines off of cue cards. These seem to be the moments when lead star, Hillary Swank, is also the most comfortable. Pity they have to come almost at the end.

I really can think of few things that are more annoying than a movie that takes the wrong approach to its material. P.S. I Love You is so wrong-headed in its humor and the handling of most of its drama, it's not even funny. The characters are not the least bit interesting, nor are they ever developed into anyone we could attach ourselves to in the first place. There's a subplot concerning Holly possibly finding love with a guy who works at the Irish bar she always hangs out. He's been written so blandly, he all but disappears into the background, and you quickly realize that the movie would be no different with or without him. Harry Connick Jr has to fill the shoes of this underwritten character, and he seems to spend most of his scenes with Swank's character wondering the same thing we are - What does he see in her? The movie keeps their potential relationship at such an extreme distance that when their storyline reaches its end, we meet it with casual indifference instead of the feelings we're supposed to be experiencing. When Holly meets another man during her trip to Ireland, we don't even find ourselves thinking about the guy she left behind back at home. The movie seems to forget about him as well, as he's hardly ever mentioned after that.
I mentioned Things We Lost in the Fire earlier in this review, but thinking back, I also remembered another comedy-drama called Catch and Release that also dealt with a woman seeking help from her friends and family after the death of her husband. It's yet another example of the material done better. P.S. I Love You does almost nothing right. It's hard to watch almost from the first frame, and even though it's just over two hours long, it feels a lot longer than that while you're watching it. When the long-overdue end credits started to roll, I was left feeling depressed and angry. That's something only a truly awful movie can do to me.

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