Holly Kennedy (Hilary Swank) is a mess. Her husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) has died and she just can’t get over it. Even her mother Patricia (Kathy Bates) and best friends Denise (Lisa Kudrow) and Sharon (Gina Gershon) can’t help ease the woman’s mind, Holly lost wallowing in her misery as the rest of the world passes her by.

Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler in Warner Bros.' P.S. I Love You

Things begin to change for the young widow when a letter from Gerry arrives seemingly out of thin air. It tells her there will be more such notes, none of which will come from an identical source and each one giving her a task that she must complete. Suddenly Holly is going out again, making friends with the new bartender Daniel (Harry Connick Jr.) working at her mother’s Irish pub and taking a trip to Ireland with Denise and Sharon to visit Gerry’s old homestead. Through it all the woman begins to finally let go of the past, these missives from her husband just the push she needed to start believing in herself and getting on with her life.

Based on the best-selling novel by Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You is not a very good movie. Heavy handed and entirely too maudlin, this supposedly empowering feminine journey of self discovery is anything but. I didn’t like Holly at all, was borderline offended that it took the gentle hand holding of a man, a very dead man, to finally make her realize she was wallowing in mawkish self pity. It is annoying and trite, and what I imagine worked reasonably okay in paragraph form does nothing but raise a person’s exasperated ire to the boiling point here.

It would help immeasurably if Gerry were someone you could understand losing all your marbles over. The thing is, Butler plays him with such a saccharine dim-wittedness, such an overly-enthusiastic joviality, I started half expecting beams of bright yellow sunshine and arches of multicolored rainbows to come bursting out of his backside. The guy is a walking talking Prozac commercial, smiling so incessantly I half wanted to rip the lips right off his face and start slapping him with them.

Not that people can’t be constantly happy in movies, I just don’t think making your central dead figure such a bastion of blissful exhuberance works all that well in the context of assembling a movingly dramatic motion picture. If I were going to accept Holly and Gerry’s relationship as something timeless and eternal, a thing so strong it would be almost impossible to get over once lost, then I need to see something more than a series of smiles, laughs, winks, nudges and kisses. There has to be some meat to the couple’s bones here, some complexity which could bring their former marriage to strong, vivacious life.

But writer and director Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud) never finds a way to do this, instead relying upon genteel genre clichés so obvious they start to become insulting. Pity, because as a writer he’s journeyed to this place before with Clint Eastwood on their adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County and absolutely knocked that one out of the park. The potential for failure was high there and yet instead he managed to craft something timeless and true, the emotional honesty found between the two central characters there as realistic and as genuine as any you’re ever likely to find.

As for Swank, the less I write about her probably the better it is. Let me just say that as much as I adore the two-time Oscar winning actress (and I think she’s one of the most fearlessly talented artists working today) she is hopelessly miscast here, not once registering as the pathetic and flippantly self-serving Holly. She’s not very good, almost phoning this performance in, and it is easy to say the sooner she grabs another script like Million Dollar Baby or Boys Don’t Cry (or even Freedom Writers) the better. 

Not everything is a total waste. Kudrow has some nice (if very Friends-like) moments, while Connick Jr. nearly steals the film with a loony portrait so out there and unhinged it almost defies description. There is also some great camerawork by Terry Stacey (The Nanny Diaries), the cinematographer managing to evoke an authentic intimacy the rest of the picture sadly lacks. Other than that, P.S. I Love You is a cinematic love letter best left undelivered.

Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  P.S. I Love You Theatrical Trailer