P.S. I Love You (2007)

There is a scene in which a woman learns her dead husband has arranged a series of letters to guide her through grief, and the film commits to this premise with the solemnity of a state funeral. Hilary Swank plays Holly, a Manhattan widow who receives cassette recordings and handwritten notes from beyond the grave, each signed with the title phrase. The mechanics are tidy. The emotions are louder. Critics at the time found the casting strange and the writing worse, and the film went on to earn $157 million worldwide anyway, which tells us something about the audience for well-dressed sorrow.

The picture centers a woman, her two closest female friends, and a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and it grants all of them interior lives and romantic complications of their own. That is the extent of its progressive ambition. The friends exist to announce pregnancies and engagements so that Holly may feel her own stagnation more keenly, which is a narrative function rather than a statement. The cast is uniformly white. The setting is a Manhattan apartment and a rented Irish cottage. Nobody discusses money, race, sexuality, or the climate. The film is not lecturing anyone about anything, which in this case is simply a description of its priorities.

What remains is a conventional melodrama about a woman learning to design shoes and to release a husband she cannot quite bury. It is competent at the tear-duct level and incurious everywhere else. The Irish accent work has been apologized for by the actor himself, which spares us the trouble. We are left with a film that wants to be about healing and succeeds at being about scheduling, since grief here arrives on a reliable postal timetable. A gentle artifact of its era, and nothing more.