Love Happens

BEFORE KICKING this useless film in its stupid, fat head, let us pause to, once again, bemoan an infuriating irregularity in contemporary genre classification.

Love Happens, like such beasts as PS I Love Youand The Breakup,has already been offered as evidence of decline in the American romantic comedy. We'll say it just one more time and then leave the issue to rot. These films are not comedies. They may occasionally attempt to be funny (and fail), but so does Hamlet, and nobody calls that a comedy.

So what is Love Happens? A paid message from the Seattle Tourist Board? An audiovisual memorandum from the Register of Moronic Aphorisms and Fatuous Pleasantries? An emetic in celluloid form? All these things and more, my friends.

Jennifer Aniston, her ironic charm curdling more with every release, plays a Seattle florist who, for no reason I can fathom, has taken to writing obscure words behind paintings in posh hotels. One day, a visiting self-help guru, played by the mountainously blonde Aaron Eckhart, spots her and dares to invite her out on a date.

Eckhart’s wife died a few years previously and, until he comes to terms with his own role in the catastrophe, he remains burdened by a variety of colourful neuroses. Sadly, the viewer’s hopes that he beat his missus to death with a rusty crowbar are almost certain to be unsatisfied. It’s not that sort of film.

Here’s what sort of film it is. In the opening act, we watch Eckhart as he introduces a group of recently bereaved clients to a series of patently absurd exercises: They stand in a busy street. They walk on coals. They scream “A-okay!” at anything that moves. One initially assumes that the film-makers are presenting this self-help claptrap as a comic interlude, but it fast becomes clear that we are meant to take his aural snake-oil seriously.

Opportunities announce themselves. If you see anybody emerging from this badly acted, clumsily structured, wretchedly sentimental film looking refreshed and improved, then consider selling him or her a nonexistent timeshare in an imaginary resort. Gullible rubes are a resource worth exploiting.