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P.S. I Love You

In 1990, prior to The English Patient, Anthony Minghella made one of my favorite movies, Truly Madly Deeply, about a woman (Juliet Stevenson) whose refusal to carry on after the death of her husband (Alan Rickman) causes his ghost to return to her. It’s not a movie that a lot of people have seen, though anyone who has will likely be thinking of it during P.S. I Love You. The premise here is only faux supernatural: Widow Holly Kennedy (Hillary Swank) is guided through a year or mourning by letters from her late husband (Gerard Butler), who wrote them as he lay dying from a brain tumor in the knowledge that she would probably fall to pieces after he was gone. That may sound arrogant, but in reality what we’re talking about here is the perfect husband of all time, a guy who puts his wife’s well-being above his even from beyond the grave. Frankly, he’s perfect in just about every way, for which reason I hope my wife doesn’t see this movie—who needs to try to live up to this kind of a role model? Especially when he’s played by Gerard Butler, with his lilting Irish accent and more realistic physique than the muscle suit he wore in 300?

I hate to use the C word, but what we have here is the chick flick of the year. It’s shapeless and goes on about a half hour too long, but fans of this kind of thing won’t mind because it hits all the buttons it’s aiming at with reasonable aplomb. After the 15-minute opening scene in which Swank and the not-yet-deceased Butler argue and make up with equal degrees of cuteness, it generally avoids being actively annoying, save for the scenes featuring Lisa Kudrow. But as I will be the first to admit, for a movie like this my opinion matters not a whit.