The single biggest problem with PS I LOVE YOU is that all the supporting characters are more interesting than Holly, the main character. This is as much a function of the writing as of the relative talents involved, even though the main character is played by two-time Oscar® winner Hilary Swank.
Holly is gawky, maudlin, whiney, singularly uninteresting, and generally a downer to be around. And that’s before she becomes the young widow of Gerry (Gerard Butler), the effusive, and effusively sexy Irishman who loves her madly for some reason. Her wacky pals, Lisa Kudrow and Gina Gershon, do their best to keep her spirits up, as does Daniel (Harry Connick, Jr), the new bartender who kinda sorta hits on her at Gerry’s wake held at the establishment run by Holly’s mother.
Gerry may be dead, but he’s arranged for letters to be sent to Holly every so often in order for her to get on with her life. They come with things like a birthday cake, a dare to sing karaoke, a ticket to the old sod. If only Holly were written more arrestingly. If only Swank could inject some charisma into the pedestrian writing. Alas, neither is the case. The film sputters along for much too long, full of talky blather with too much Holly and not nearly enough of everyone else. Even Kathy Bates as Holly’s disapproving mother is more compelling in moods both comic and tragic. Butler earns his co-star billing by popping up in flashbacks, voiceovers, and, of course, Holly’s imagination, and when he does, the film ignites with passion of many sorts. He’s dynamic whether bemoaning his lack of hot nasty sex with Holly, doing a very bad striptease, tearing into a song, or just quietly putting his head on his widow’s shoulder. Gershon and her cynical sophistication are criminally underused, but Kudrow, as a woman on an organized manhunt (there is a questionnaire involved) is vibrant, robust, and just a tad scary (in a good way). Connick, with a back story that is the romantic version of the Hindenberg, isn’t so much adorable as challenging in an adorable way. If they had left Holly to vegetate in her apartment, and there is never a reason NOT to wonder why they don’t, this would have been a first-rate entertainment. As it is, they tread water as Swank pulls them under with a mix of bland earnestness and uncertain humor.
The script, based on the novel of the same name by Cecelia Ahern, doesn’t breathe life into the prose so much as put a damper on it. The emotional tug is lost in uninspired dialogue, trite situations, and some plot twists that defy credulity while exploring the limits of tedious convention. PS I LOVE YOU is the essence of everything that gives Chick Lit a bad name. And then some.
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