Overlong Look at the Grieving Process Spotlighting an Uncharacteristically Miscast Swank

Rating: 4/10 (22 January 2008)

Grief can be a painfully long process, but does that mean a movie needs to capture that experience in real time? Actually a year elapses in this marathon 126-minute film, but director Richard LaGravenese's episodic treatment is so sluggish that the end didn't come soon enough for me. This is the first of several problems with this 2007 romantic dramedy and co-written by LaGravenese and Steven Rogers and actually not the biggest. That dubious distinction belongs to star Hilary Swank as Holly Kennedy, a high-strung Manhattan real estate agent closing in on thirty and married nearly a decade to Gerry, a hunky, free-wheeling Irish musician. Physically angular with a performance pitched between severely pinched and gawkily awkward, Swank lacks the innate malleability to carry off the role. It's the type that Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock can do in their sleep, but obviously the torch has to be passed. Despite moments of genuine likability and vulnerability, Swank lets it drop.
The movie opens with a lengthy and extremely contrived marital squabble between Holly and Gerry and then wastes no time in flashing forward months later to Gerry's wake at the Irish bar that Holly's mother runs. Throughout the rest of the movie, Holly grieves by having frequent flashbacks to the happier days with Gerry, that is, when she is not fantasizing about Gerry still being alive. The plot turns on the conceit that he wrote a series of letters before his death that he intends to be delivered to Holly at key moments during her first year without him, and Holly's responses to the letters make up what constitutes the impetus of the storyline. There are some poorly developed turns, but there are some good moments primarily courtesy of an unusually stellar supporting cast starting with Kathy Bates as Holly's straight-shooting mother whose own husband left her in a less tragic manner; Gina Gershon as Sharon, one of Holly's best friends; and Lisa Kudrow as her other friend, the more hedonistic Denise. In fact, Kudrow's crack comedy timing is such a contrast to Swank's tentative, redundant manner that it upsets the balance of the film.
The men fare somewhat better. A genuinely charismatic actor, Gerard Butler plays Gerry with such unfettered joy that it really is a wonder why he is attracted to Holly in the first place. Their "cute" first encounter on an isolated Irish road is painful to watch not because of Gerry's impending doom but because Swank overdoes her impersonation of a naïve college student. As potential paramour Billy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, an American actor who actually does a better Irish accent than Butler (a Scotsman) lends the necessary smoldering presence, but he is painted too ideally to be that compelling. Harry Connick, Jr., on the other hand, plays a genuinely idiosyncratic suitor, Daniel, a somewhat off-kilter bartender who may have Asperger's Syndrome. It's an oddly discomforting ploy, but at least it's different, and Connick shows he still has a good comedy sense. Rural Ireland certainly looks idyllic thanks to Terry Stacey's cinematography, although I have to say the musical soundtrack comes across as too predictably coy to help complement scenes. I recommend skipping this one for more worthwhile treatments on grieving like Anthony Minghella's "Truly Madly Deeply" or even Jerry Zucker's "Ghost".