Cynical Cinema

P.S. I Love You is out on DVD now.  My girlfriend watched it with her friends, then insisted that I absolutely had to watch it with her also.  And I get why.  I really do.  This movie is designed specifically with women in mind, and I think the people who made this decided to completely forego any audience they might receive with men and concentrate entirely on the female demographic.  So it’s the opposite of, say, Shoot ‘Em Up, a movie that didn’t care about a female audience at all.  And neither one is very good, for that reason.  When you decide to make a movie, and you decide to focus that movie entirely toward one group of people, the movie becomes very calculated.  You are designing a movie, moreso than creating one.  And P.S. I Love You is an incredibly calculated, contrived film.

It stars Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank as a married couple who are still hopelessly in love after twelve years of marriage.  Then he dies.  He has had this inoperable brain tumour, see, and he knew he was going to die.  But he knew that pretty young Hilary Swank was going to be devastated by his passing, and was going to lose her mind, so he decided to help her out.  And before he died, he created a series of notes and messages that would be delivered to her from beyond the grave.  Oooooh.  So, she gets these notes, and follows the instructions, and eventually gets over her crushing grief.  In the meantime, each note triggers a memory of Butler, so we get to see flashbacks of them in younger, happier times, being in love. 

And that’s all there is to this movie.  It’s basically two hours of people being in love.  And people loving each other for TWO hours is BORING.  And the love story is not the only thing that’s contrived here.  Hilary Swank goes to Ireland at one point.  While there, she meets a guy and tells him her whole story - my husband died, I’m here to see his country and family, blah blah blah…my name is Holly…then they sleep together.  Then, in the morning, she says her husband’s name.  And they both get a shock when they find out that they actually know each other!  He is her husband’s childhood best friend!  Well…wouldn’t he have put two and two together?  I have a best friend that recently died, he married a girl named Holly, there is an American woman in his home town named Holly, whose husband has recently died…and she looks exactly like the Holly I met when they got together…wait, that’s YOU?  It makes no sense, but lets us in on more tear-jerking moments and some “humour”.

But the most contrived thing about the movie is the constant preponderance of tear-jerking moments.  With a film like this - dead guy, grieving widow, there are many opportunites to throw maudlin, sappy, crying moments into it.  And this film does not miss a single opportunity to do so.  And so some women might enjoy this, because they want to cry throughout an entire movie.  But me, being a cynical guy, am screaming “come on, already!  That’s enough!”  But it isn’t enough.  They need to cram more of it in there.  And so we get two full hours of this, which is way too long.  This movie is a calculated, irritating string of moments designed to make people sad.  And there is really no story whatsoever.  It is two hours of two people being in love, and because one of those people is dead, we sob into our hankies and wipe our tears on the pillows on the couch and appreciate our loved ones around us.

 Or, we get uncomfortable, irritated, and we count the minutes until it is over.  Two hours of people being in love, even if those two people are as attractive and likeable and good as Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, is not a movie.  Kathy Bates plays Swank’s mother, and she is given nothing at all to do.  Gina Gershon and Lisa Kudrow show up as her best friends, and they are fairly useless except to create contrived comedic scenes.  Like the one where their lifejackets all inflate.  Hilarious.  And Harry Connick Jr., while he is quite funny in the film, doesn’t seem to serve any purpose either, and Swank’s relationship with him is so briefly touched upon that when it comes to a head later in the film, we have absolutely no idea why.  If you are going to watch a movie designed by a focus group for women to make you cry, watch The Notebook.  At least that film had a story, and you just might enjoy it.  P.S. I Love You is just too calculated to be any good at all.

The working title for the new film Shattered was Butterfly On a Wheel. That would have been a better title, because it would have made no sense. The inclusion of the phrase in the movie also makes no sense. The full quote is “who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel”, and it comes from a poem by Alexander Pope called “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”, which is a true classic in the world of poetry. In it’s context in the poem, it refers to an enemy of Pope’s. His doctor (Dr. Arbothnot, it would seem) had warned him about the dangers of composing poems that attacked his peers in society, and so Pope responded by sending him a series of poems that attacked these people. The line, used in it’s proper context, refers to a wheel, the medieval torture device, which seems excessive when used to destroy a butterfly, and exists as a testament to the cruelty and excessive nature of one who would do such a thing. As my friend Kent used to say “it’s like swatting a fly with a Buick”.

In it’s context in the movie, the line is meant to be taken differently. Gerard Butler and Maria Bello play a married couple with a charming young daughter, who is captured by a sociopathic Pierce Brosnan, who holds her for ransom. Before long, it becomes clear that Brosnan is not in this for money, but rather for some kind of personal vendetta against this family. He will kill their daughter, you see, unless Bello and Butler jump through all kinds of hoops. It sets up a Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma…what would you do to save your child? Would you kill an innocent person? And other such light-hearted fare. The quote from Pope comes up again and again, but it is fairly misused. The idea behind it in the film is that this couple are the butterfly, and are so insignificant to Brosnan that he can toy with them, as he would a butterfly upon a wheel. And he is so cruel crazy and evil that he is willing to toruture them in this excessive way. This seems to be the correct interpretation of the quote. However, the twist at the end changes things, and the quote all of a sudden becomes terribly misused.

Ah, yes. The TWIST at the END. I can’t review this movie very well without giving away the ending, and I am tempted to do so because this is one of those irritating by-the-numbers twist-ending movies. I will not, because I’m sure some people will watch and enjoy this. But there have been so many movies made in this style, especially since the success of The Usual Suspects. And there have been many that were better than Shattered. Derailed was better than this movie. Here’s the problem with this twist ending. The director paid a lot of attention to the mechanics of the twist. He went into the movie knowing the ending, and made sure that if you watch the movie again, the right things happen at the right time. It all makes sense mechanically. Yes, that guy could have said that thing to that lady while the other guy was over here. Fine. But the emotional reactions of the people involved are not so closely monitored. Knowing what we know (at the end, and maybe quite a bit earlier), the reactions of the key people in key situations are not what they should be. And the contrivances of the plot, which seems (at the end) to have been so meticulously planned out, seem so forced. If one of the characters involved did anything, at certain points, other than what they actually did in that situation, the whole plan could not have proceeded as it did.

I know, this all sounds so vague. If that guy and this guy had talked to this guy instead of that guy…this is because I think people might actually watch the film and enjoy it. And there are some good things to work with here. Maria Bello is terrific in her role as the terrorized mom, and Gerard Bulter has moments of great acting as well. But overall, this is simply an obvious, pain-by-numbers BIG TWIST movie, where the twist at the end becomes the only reason any of the movie was ever made. And that is obnoxious. Imagine…Eric Clapton going through the motions on Layla just so he could get to that piano part.