Love Happens | Drama | rated PG-13 (A) | starring Aaron Eckhart, Jennifer Aniston, John Carroll Lynch, Martin Sheen, Judy Greer | 1:49 mins
(Aaron Eckhart) is a widower who wrote a book about grieving and loss cheesily titled “A-Okay”. A book that skyrocketted to success and has turned Burke into celebrity on the verge of an unexpected Dr. Phil level of commercial success. While hosting a multi-day seminar in his home town of Seattle he meets a flourist (Jennifer Aniston) who along with the father (Martin Sheen) of his deceased wife helps him realize that he hasn’t followed his own advice and gotten over his wife’s death himself.
Movie reviews are for the most part entertainment, not informative. On that rare occasion where it can be informative is when you can a) introduce people to a cinematic gem they may not otherwise have ever heard of or b) let people know that a movie is not what it appears to be. That is the case here. For better or worse, Love Happens is not at all what it appears to be. The generically titled movie has been marketed as another Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy. The promos, the poster (<- this poster, right here), that cheesy tagline, all promote a movie that this isn’t. It is a drama, straight-up, about a widower dealing with loss and a woman who tries for some inexplicable reason to help him through it. Because it doesn’t try to be funny or preach to us it comes off better than the average chick flick.
It’s an oddball through. A mostly light movie about deadly serious things Love‘s tone at times threatens to undermine and even make a mockery of it’s solumn material. It’s a drama about grief that seems to have been constructed out of spare romantic comedy parts. We’ve got rom-com staple supporting actress Judy Greer once again as the leading ladies best friend. We’ve got a nice, robust rom-com score/soundtrack. And we have the usual bump-into meet cute scenario, this movie’s quirky oddity being that Aniston’s character writes long, rarely used words behind hotel paintings. Why? That’s never explained. It’s also never explained why one minute Eckhart and Aniston are at each other’s throats in the hotel Men’s room, in which Aniston unknowingly insults Eckhart’s dead wife, and the next minute he is asking her out and they are at dinner together. Huh? There appears to be an entire reel missing. Logic & realism be damned, Love Happens has two leading stars to get together and doesn’t have the time to convince us of anything.
It’s a shame that this second deeply cliche movie keeps breaking in on the first movie, which when left to Eckart’s Burke and his attempts to help out his group, is not bad. John Carroll Lynch plays a particularly hesitant member of the seminar suffering the loss of his son. When the movie sticks with Lynch’s at one point gut-wrenching portrayal of a greiving father looking for answers and posing Burke his biggest challenge yet – it actually bumps up against good. It’s heart is in the right place, but it doesn’t have the creative tools to do the topic justice.
I won’t quite call it schizophrenic, but time and again the movie swerves back into the useless Aniston B-story territory with set pieces involving a borrowed bucket lift and stolen parrot that mimics car alarms. It’s hard for this section of the film to register as a love story because Eckhart and Aniston have no, zero (0) chemestry. But despite the mismatched nature of the A & B stories, neither is developed enough to stand on it’s own either. Burke’s attempts as a grief counselor isn’t imaginative or compelling enough to create an entire movie and the lame-brain flower shop/widower romance certainly isn’t either.
Love Happens is an inoffensive, agreeable enough movie that might work for you if you’re half asleep or your expectations are on the floor. It avoids the pot holes most movies of this kind fall into, which is admirable, but it’s reach is further than it can grasp. Despite a few well-done touches, it’s two halves do not equal a whole, it’s quirky story points are completely random and it is agonizingly cliche.