Movie: Awkward, Artificial, Icky; Butler: Charming as Ever

Rating: 1/10 (22 December 2007)

First, let's get this out of the way: Gerard Butler is one of the sexiest men alive. Throughout "P.S. I Love You" he maintains his irresistible charm and masculine grace.
As for the movie itself, "P.S. I Love You" is abysmal. It is, throughout, simply, awkward. Scenes plod without apparent purpose or design. Characters and actors seem to be coming from different films. Lines of dialogue fall flat as suicide jumpers.
You don't know whether the filmmaker's goal was to create a heartwarming scene or a gut-wrenching fight. Hillary Swank is especially out of place. I felt she must be doing a film in a studio next door and just visiting the set of this film.
I spent the hour after watching it wondering how so many talented people could have made such a lousy movie. 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.
The biggest problems are the script and the directing. The script is hollow and incoherent. Not a single believable, consistent character emerges from this muddle. Holly, the lead, (Hillary Swank), is, by turns, depicted as a castrating, frustrated shrew, a nature girl deadhead hippie, 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, wacko scum. The main premise  that a man dictates his wife's life after his death  is downright creepy.
So, what happened to Richard Lagravenese, who has written great scripts in the past? My best guess: neither he nor anybody else involved has any respect for the potential for excellence in a movie about women and for women, and so they just cut and pasted 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. One catfight, coming up. Okay, here we need a poignant mother-daughter moment. Let's rewrite a scene from 'Terms of Endearment' and spackle 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, and 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.