One can hear the gears grinding all the way through

Rating: 4/10 (31 August 2010)

Before he dies, Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) - the pluckiest victim of a brain tumor since the stiff-upper-lipped Bette Davis faced-down a similar fate in "Dark Victory" - comes up with an ingenious way to continue giving Holly (Hilary Swank), his soon-to-be widow, advice from beyond the grave. He composes a series of upbeat letters to be delivered to her at regular intervals after he's gone - missives that contain specific instructions on how to pick up the pieces of her shattered world and move on with her life. You see, Holly was kind of an uptight stick-in-the-mud when they were married, and now the too-good-to-be-true, happy-go-lucky Irishman wants to loosen her up by getting her to perform karaoke, sending her on an all-expenses-paid trip to the place of his birth, and encouraging her to become a cobbler (I kid you not). But will Gerry's continued presence in his widow's life actually retard her ability to let go of the past and start anew? And does this "Ghost" knockoff stand a ghost of a chance of becoming as universally beloved as that earlier husband-hanging-around-after-death classic?
Beyond the cringe-inducing creepiness of its premise, "P.S. I Love You," based on the novel by Cecilia Ahern, is one of those annoying romantic comedies in which the women get all goofy, frisky and/or tongue-tied the moment some good-looking guy so much as steps into their line of vision. Moreover, Gerry is portrayed as such a saintly figure, both before his demise and most definitely thereafter, that we never get to know him as a real, flesh-and-blood person in his own right; instead, in order to make all the ladies in the audience swoon over his magnificent romantic spirit - one, I might add, that no man in the real world has the slightest hope of ever living up to - writer/director Richard LaGravenese has seen fit to deprive Gerry of all those flaws each of us is entitled to just for being a member of the human race - and which are truly the only things that make a character interesting in the end. And with that crucial dimension missing from the couple's relationship, we soon lose interest in Holly as well. And, of course, the movie cheats by having Gerry's illness take place entirely off-camera, so as not to disturb the light romantic tone of the piece, but it does little to make us care about the couple. The movie finally hits on some honest sentiment round about the 115-minute mark, and the story does avoid going down one painfully obvious narrative pathway towards the end, but, by that time, it's much too late to undo the damage.
A large cast of well-known and talented actors - Kathy Bates, Lisa Kudrow, Harry Connick Jr., among them - do yeomen work with poorly written parts, but it's an uphill slog against bathos, pratfalls and contrivance all the way. Well, at least the Irish scenery is lovely.