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Love Happens

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: PG-13
Current Showtimes: No showtimes available

So there’s this movie called Love Happens. It's about a guy and girl that meet and get to know each other. And, surprise, surprise, somewhere along the line, something happens. Can you guess what it is?

Aaron Eckhart plays Burke Ryan, the self-help doctor and author of A-Okay!, a guide to coping with and overcoming grief. However, he is unable to take the advice he gives to people in dealing with a loss of his own. Jennifer Aniston is Eloise Chandler, a self-made florist, newly single after having ended a messy relationship, leaving her very bitter and anti-men. Neither of them is looking, but nevertheless, the two meet in a Seattle hotel where Burke is teaching a weekend-long seminar on how to overcome loss, and where Eloise is hired to professionally arrange floral decor. Naturally, the two are perfect for each other but, thanks to bad timing, get off to a rocky start. But soon that all changes when “they least expect it,” and they realize that they may be exactly what the other needs; Burke, to finally confront the death of his wife, and Eloise to overcome the hurt and betrayal in her past. They learn that it’s okay to hurt, that it’s necessary, and that the only way to move on is to let go.

The plot of Love Happens alone makes for the perfect, albeit predictable, romantic tear-jerker, or it would if we cared. We’ve seen it all before; over, and over, and over again. There’s nothing all that original about this film, despite its small attempts at uniqueness, which, in the end, fail to outweigh the film’s predictability anyway. It’s recycled, slow-paced and lacks the usual charm of a romantic drama. It’s difficult to find any part of the narrative to actually care about (with, maybe, the exception of Burke’s patient Walter, played by John Carroll Lynch, whose story was just about the only bit that kept me remotely interested). The characters aren’t emotionally investing or even exciting, not even the hookah-smoking, feminist, slam poet Marty (Judy Greer), who begins the film with a bit of promise. That little glimmer of hope we might have been given by actors like Eckhart and Aniston vanishes faster that we can say “A-OKAY!” thanks to their uninspiring performances and chemistry which hardly ignites. In fact, I don’t believe that anything is really happening between them, especially not love.

I wish I could say this film had a few redeeming qualities, be it dialogue or direction (I’m sure writer/director Brandon Camp tried), or even Martin Sheen for that matter, but even they read more like an expired cliché. I guess somewhere in this movie love happens…sort of...maybe; but, sadly, it just didn’t happen for me.