Love Happens - Blu-ray Review

'having one character in deep depression and even deeper denial is fine, having a whole cast of them is downright glum'

In some ways, I applaud Jennifer Aniston for making Love Happens (stop snickering at the back) because, for perhaps the first time since Friends ended, I didn't see her character, Eloise, as being a slightly older version of Rachel. You see, despite a cheating boyfriend, she's not really the one with all the ditzyness and troubles in her life, a role filled instead by Aaron Eckhart's Burke, a mess of a man if ever there was one.

Placed in the perhaps uncomfortable situation of having to expand her horizons slightly, Aniston falters, forced into a role which demands some sympathy and invention rather than the faux-glam fawning of more recent roles. Her task is made more difficult being forced opposite Eckhart, playing a dynamo of a man with more problems than Rachel ever had to cope with. Burke appears to be afraid of elevators, of leaving home, a heavy, but secretive, drinker, a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Love Happens' problem though, is that whilst having one character in deep depression and even deeper denial is fine, having a whole cast of them is downright glum. As Burke moves through his self-help seminars, more and more tragic stories are writ large and as character after character expunges their demons, Burke's grow bigger. What this leads to is just a general feeling that no one is ever going to live happily ever after in this fairy tale, a depressing thought which is especially accentuated whenever John Carroll Lynch's character is on screen and frequently kills any humour to be had in what is definitely meant to be a romantic comedy.

Depression is fine in a film though if it has the machinations to cope. Love Happens really doesn't, nor does it have any inventiveness and time and again, tired plot devices are trotted out to change the tone and divert the characters along different paths. There's the comedy animal, the kooky best friend who likes slam poetry (Judy Greer), the curmudgeonly old father (Martin Sheen) who wants a reconciliation and Burke's there-for-him-but-is-he-really agent-cum-best friend (Dan Fogler). The one plus point is that we get to see Seattle, a beautiful American city seen all too rarely on film, but by the time the ultimate emotive plot machination (a slow hand clap coupled with soaring strings) is trotted out at the end, you'll know that Love Happens disappeared into the pit of despair somewhere around half way through.

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'the fact that Eloise kept using huge words to make herself seem smarter just highlighted the fact that there was nothing natural about it: you could tell that the actors were forcing the script out of their mouths' - Alice In Movieland, 4/10