Good grief!
The title alone of Love Happens should be warning enough that this romantic-comedy is the kind of cloying, saccharine-saturated date movie that only the most deluded of fools in love would enjoy.
Worse still, the title doesn't actually convey much of the actual plot, which is about a man still in mourning (and denial) three years after his wife's death, who nonetheless makes a lucrative living as a self-help guru counselling others on how to cope with the loss of loved ones.
While doing a week-long seminar in Seattle – the city where IT (the car accident) happened, Burke Ryan (played by Aaron Eckhart) encounters Eloise, a kooky florist (played by Jennifer Aniston), whose first instinct is to brush him off by pretending to be deaf.
Would that she had been successful, the audience would have been spared close to two hours of plodding, painfully predictable pseudo-drama interspersed with occasional dollops of comedy lite.
Predictability works in inverse relation to suspense, so the questions raised – Will Burke finally deal with his own grief and reconcile with his in-laws? Will Dan the contractor, grieving the death of his son, finally learn to accept it after a shopping spree at Home Depot? Will Burke and Eloise finally realize they may be right for each other? – are each a resoundingly foreseeable yes, yes and yes.
Eckhart, with the best cleft chin in Hollywood since Kirk Douglas, gets by far the most screen time and he's a likeable sort.
But it's hard to respect a character which as the author of A-Okay, a guide to grief relief, spouts such tripe that he makes Dr. Phil sound like Aristotle.
Despite the fact that it's sleetless in Seattle, Aniston overdresses for all her exterior scenes in a succession of designer wool hats and loopy scarves. Indoors, her blond highlights shimmers along with the kind of wardrobe you'd see on a college-age kid with rich parents.
Her baby blues express a sort of vaguely puzzled, enigmatic quality throughout (possibly because she keeps forgetting her motivation).
Supporting players – his agent, her co-worker – just aren't funny enough to steal a scene and Martin Sheen, who plays the ex-Marine father-in-law who's actually just a big teddy bear inside, is actually kind of creepy.
Seattle tourist officials must be thrilled by the city's starring role throughout, featuring identifiable local landmarks and amenities such as the Space Needle, slam poetry, grunge rock and coffee houses equipped with hookahs which burn only non-offending substances.
Too cynical, you might say?
Not one-tenth as cynical as the studio execs who gave this vacuous rom-com the green-light, knowing it would score at the box office.
Love happens?
Yeah well, so does boredom and bad filmmaking.