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Movie review: P.S. I Love You
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
She wants a baby and a new apartment, he wants her; she thinks their life is “never gonna start,” he says they’re going to last. Holly (Hilary Swank) and Gerry (Gerard Butler) Kennedy sometimes speak different languages when they think of the future. Until, suddenly, there is no future.
Gerry dies, and Holly can no longer ask her beloved “leprechaun” to give her exactly what she needs to make life perfect. Tender and truthful, P.S. I Love You is a five-hankie treat whose sensitive treatment of grief suffers only occasional lapses into melodrama and cheap laughs.
With regrets, memories, longings and Gerry’s ashes in an urn, Holly retreats into isolated misery. Maybe she’ll “become the Miss Havisham of the Lower East Side,” Holly tells her mother (Kathy Bates); a woman still maladjusted years after her own husband “disappeared” from her life.
Holly would like to “stop my life right here;” but life has other plans for her. Plans set down in letters that suddenly appear; written by Gerry and signed, “P.S., I love you.”
It’s Holly’s birthday, and Gerry wants her to celebrate, no matter what. A cake and an audio tape arrive: Gerry’s loving message that he wants Holly to put her sorrow aside and look for happiness.
Over the course of a year, as she “sees” Gerry in so many places that remind her of their life together, Holly follows Gerry’s love note orders and admonitions that it is ok for her to cry, to laugh, to hope, to despair, to remember and to forget.
Friends and family (Gina Gershon, Lisa Kudrow), a trip to Ireland where it all began for her and Gerry, and tentative explorations of attraction for other men chart the arduous transition from profound wound to healing acceptance.
Swank has wowed viewers with tougher stuff than this; but she is no cream puff here. Respectful of tears and despair as much as giggles and joy, her strength of character never wavers; and her dignity and genuine feeling bring the story back to an even keel after more than one lapse into low brow stupidity.
An Alcon Entertainment production, Warner Bros. Pictures release; rated PG-13 for sexual references, brief nudity.
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