Are you ever too old to fall in love with your high school sweetheart? This is the primary question that fuels P.S., the charming, well-written but ultimately unsatisfying romantic comedy that marks the sophomore effort from writer/director Dylan Kidd. Further developing his reputation as Neil LaBute with a conscience, Kidd repeats his Roger Dodger formula by taking the things we treasure - in this case love, fidelity, and the notion of soul mates - and dumping them all into a blender. What pours out at the end may not always look good, but it does leave a pleasant aftertaste.
The compellingly sincere Laura Linney is Louise Harrington, a 39-year-old admissions clerk at Columbia University whose bland existence seems like a 'Cathy' comic strip come to life. One ordinary afternoon, her entire life is thrown into disarray via a letter from a prospective student who shares names with the teenager that broke Louise's heart twenty years ago. Intrigued, she calls the boy in for a meeting.
F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace) is everything that Louise remembers about the boy she once loved - in addition to the name, he shares the same passion for art, the same desire to change the world, the same look, enthusiasm, and reckless charm. The old Scott, we are told, died young in a car accident and left Louise to grow old alone. Is this her soul mate reincarnated? Will she fall for him again? How will her family, ex-husband (Gabriel Byrne), and the best friend (Marcia Gay Harden) who stole the old Scott away react to this bizarre romance?
Not with nearly enough effectiveness, unfortunately. Linney smiles, cries and charms her way into our hearts with a goofy young spinster glow that should have Bridget Jones taking notes. Topher Grace, although lacking credibility as a tortured artist, harnesses considerable charisma while convincing us that a woman could fall for him so recklessly. But writer/director Kidd, working off a novel by Helen Schulman, abandons these colorful characters on a black-and-white backdrop. 'Some people just won't let themselves be happy,' a character says to Louise during the movie; that same sentence could have been said to Kidd when he sat down to write character number three.
The Oscar-winning Harden, along with the winning presences of Byrne and Paul Rudd (as Louise's recovering drug-addict brother), are wasted with just a handful of scenes apiece. Harden gets the best treatment, swooping in to make a sexy, boozy play at F. Scott's affections, but Byrne is reduced to a blubbering coward while Rudd's character can't leave his mother's kitchen. With Roger Dodger, Kidd knew that his strength was in creating relationships between two compelling characters, so he left everyone else in the background. This time he's stretching, and it shows.
It's a shame, because there are some shimmering pearls to be found. Like LaBute, Kidd has a gift for sharp, unpredictable, brutally frank dialogue that can be intoxicating. As P.S. shows, he can also do something that the In the Company of Men writer/director never could: create a female character who is more than just an embittered man in a skirt and high heels. Kidd, and F. Scott as well, both believe that abstract art is nonsense and the best work is done when reality is the clay; watching the way P.S. can so brilliantly capture life, it's hard to disagree.
In the final few scenes, P.S. struggles to get out of the corner it's painted itself into. For the most part, the results are disastrous: Harden and Grace have some confrontation that we're not even given the courtesy of observing, Grace's character uncovers all the coincidences of his life and doesn't seem to give a flying fig, and there's no ending worse than watching people walk off together who seem like they'd have nothing to talk about five minutes after the movie's conclusion. There's also no acknowledgement of the difficulties the two would have explaining themselves to the school faculty, F. Scott's parents, or the various strangers who would be appalled by their age discrepancy.
P.S. falls into that rare category of films that make you wish you could extract the main characters and drop them into a better movie. Like Forest Whittaker in Ghost Dog, Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears or Rachel Leigh Cook and Jonathan Tucker in Stateside, Louise and F. Scott are memorable characters created by talented actors who have the misfortune of being surrounded by mediocrity. If nothing else, P.S. shows that Kidd has a lot of potential; perhaps someday he'll create a sequel that can do these characters justice.
For this and other reviews, interviews and entertainment news, read Valley Scene Magazine (http://www.valleyscenemagazine.com/)
