Traditional romances approach love by focusing on the
other: that is, the uniqueness, the perfection, the
irreplaceableness of the Loved One. You are my one and only.
Without you I shall die. There is no one else for me but you. Fate
has destined us for each other from all eternity. You get the idea.
But Hollywood doesn’t make traditional romances anymore. They have
been replaced by what we might call the therapeutic romance. Here
the focus shifts from the other to the self. The mantra for these
pictures is: Yeah, you were pretty special, but now it’s time to
move on with my life. It will be hard, but I’ll get over you and
find another lover who can meet my needs. Such a movie is Richard
LaGravenese’s P.S., I Love You, which really ought to have
been titled: “P.S., I Love Me.”
Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank plays Holly Kennedy, a young
New Yorker whose hunky, fun-loving Irish husband, Gerry (Gerard
Butler), gets a brain tumor and dies in the first reel. The death
is antiseptic and takes place off camera. There is no visible
suffering except that of the widow. Before he died, the lovably
roguish Gerry turns out to have arranged for letters and other
surprises from himself to be delivered to Holly throughout the
first year of her widowhood, all with a view to jollying her out of
her inevitable grief and instructing her in how to get over him —
and to hook up with a suitable replacement. With dead Gerry’s help,
she even finds her true calling as a shoe-designer.
Talk about a chick-flick that presses all the right buttons! For
me, however, this detail sums up what’s wrong with the picture.
Love is like pretty shoes — though they don’t look all that pretty
to me — in being just a means to the end of the heroine’s
happiness and sense of self-fulfillment. Such a story doesn’t have
anything like the same imaginative power as the old-fashioned kind
of romance in which both love and death were events of cosmic
significance in themselves and not merely opportunities to make a
more satisfying life for oneself. What, you might ask, is this
movie really about? It’s about people having feelings. First they
are hard and unpleasant feelings. Gradually they become better
feelings. The end. Do you sense a certain lack of intellectual,
artistic or spiritual sustenance in such material?
The performances also leave something to be desired. Hilary
Swank, to me, sums up what’s wrong with the Academy Awards. A
terrible actress, she has nevertheless won Best Actress not once
but twice — both times for playing tragic victims who die as a
result of or in spite of moralizing bigots. In other words, what
the Academy is awarding its prize for is not acting but a sort of
waif-like vulnerability that Miss Swank projects without even
trying. This gets her half-way home; the other half of the way
comes when she puts this congenital talent — if that is what it is
— in the service of Hollywood’s own ideology of moral, and
especially sexual, libertinism. At least she is unlikely to take
home another statuette from this picture. In it, she is neither a
trans-sexual heroine (as in Boys Don’t Cry) nor a feminist
and libertarian one (as in Million Dollar Baby), so the
moralizing is less strident — and the Oscar potential
correspondingly reduced.
Nor is the rest of the cast very much better. In spite of an
extended flashback, Mr. Butler is unable to make much of an
impression except as an idealized hunk — rather, in fact, as he
was in 300 — and neither Gina Gershon nor Lisa Kudrow as
Holly’s fun-loving but supportive gal-pals are much help either.
Kathy Bates as Holly’s hard-done-by, tough-but-tender single mom
has her moments, but Harry Connick Jr. as Gerry’s prospective
replacement is so awful that even Mr. LaGravenese is forced to
withdraw him and find someone else. What, then, is he still doing
in the picture? He doesn’t even sing!
One of the problems with the therapeutic romance is that, like
the dead or discarded lovers it concerns itself with finding
replacements for, it lacks any sense of compelling individuality.
As it troubles itself only to make the point that one romance is as
good as another, it is hardly surprising if it ends up persuading
us that it is itself similarly replaceable. Moreover, its moral
foundation is based on what the social commentator Theodore
Dalrymple calls “the hydraulic model of human desire, according to
which passion is like the pus in an abscess, which, if not drained,
causes blood poisoning, delirium, and death.”
This model goes naturally with the therapeutic romance. Thus,
when her girlfriends finally manage to push the widow Holly into
bed with a new man, one of them comments: “The longer you go
without sex, the meaner and bitchier you get.” Twice Dickens’s Miss
Havisham from Great Expectations is referred to as a
possible but rejected model for Holly’s grief-stricken life after
Gerry — but only as a sort of sick joke. It is also telling that
both times this lady’s name is mispronounced as “Haversham.” Maybe,
that is, they’ve heard of her, but they have no real acquaintance
with her. The idea that Holly — or anyone else — might feel
herself so twinned by fate with her dead lover as to remain true to
him even after death is quite literally inconceivable.
