The Age of Commercialism

Just what I expected

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

One of our finest actresses who has never made it to superstardom, Laura Linney, stars in P.S. from 2004, also starring Topher Grace, Brad Renfro, Gabriel Byrne, Lois Smith, and Marcia Gay Harden.Linney plays Louise Harrington, the admissions director for Columbia Art School. She's divorced from Peter Harrington (Byrne), but they parted friends and get together for dinner weekly. In high school, Louise fell in love with one F. Scott Feinstadt, who died in a car accident. He seems to have been the love of her life.When one F. Scott Feinstadt applies for admission to the school, she is shocked and calls him. It's her old boyfriend's voice. She sets up an interview and when he shows up, he looks just like her F. Scott. It's quite an interview - they wind up having sex in her apartment. They are incredibly attractive to one another, and the age difference doesn't seem to matter.Louise's ex-husband hits her with a brutal admission, and not only that, she learns that her brother Sam (Renfro) knew about it and never told her. She feels betrayed and hurt. Then her best friend Missy (Harden) hears Scott on the phone and is immediately intrigued. Who is this guy? Is it Scott reincarnated, some long lost relative, or just an odd coincidence?I wouldn't have rented this except that I saw a trailer for it on another DVD. It's a very sweet film, with wonderful performances by all involved. Marcia Gay Harden is one of my favorites, and she's just perfect as a wife and mother who wants adventure.Lovely film, excellent cast.

Louise Harrington (Laura Linney) is an admission officer at Columbia University School of the Arts. She takes an interest in applicant F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace). He reminds her of a teen love and she immediately has an affair with him. Her sister Missy Goldberg (Marcia Gay Harden) had actually stolen the lost love who died in a car crash as Missy's boyfriend. Louise's ex-husband Peter Harrington (Gabriel Byrne) shocks her with his sex addiction revelation. He had cheated on her with men and women during their last three years of sexless marriage. Her recovering drug addict brother Sammy Silverstein (Paul Rudd) helped him with recovery and even a new young girlfriend. Her mother Ellie Silverstein (Lois Smith) dismisses her. She starts to wonder if F. Scott is an incarnation of her dead one-true-love.Dylan Kidd's previous film is Roger Dodger. I like that one a little and this one a little less than that. Laura Linney has great sadness. The weird family characters go a little far into broad dysfunction. I don't like Topher Grace in this role. He's not mysterious enough. It would be great if he turns into fully evil. It would great if his character is something more. This is a good opportunity for something sexy, or dark, or intense. It ends up as not that much of anything.

Dylan Kidd's 'P.S.' centres around 'Louise', a 39 year old university professor who falls in love with a prospective student...thinking that he's the boyfriend who died twenty years ago. But, hang on, this isn't your usual back-from-the dead/ reincarnation love story. The film delves far deeper into Louise's psyche, exploring her inner turmoil and unresolved conflicts. We later learn that this deceased boyfriend wasn't even a nice fellow and yet Louside holds on to a memory that wasn't even real. Kidd's storytelling is quite tricky. At times I thought it was all in Louise's head but neither this nor the alternative is ever confirmed. Shot beautifully, with a fine background score. 'P.S.' is a well-made film. While the editing is mostly good, I felt some of the deleted scenes should have been left in, like the post-interview café sequence which added to the Louise and Fran characters. Laura Linney carries the role with natural grace. Her castmates Topher Grace, Lois Smith, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden and Paul Rudd provide great support. 'P.S.' may not be everyone's cup of coffee but it's definitely my kind of film.

Your enjoyment level with this movie will depend on two things.1. Your appreciation of the lovely Laura Linney.2. Your ability to appreciate individual elements that are quite good but don't come together to make a good film.Louise Harrington (Laura Linney) is the director of admissions for the art program at Columbia University. She's 39 years old and divorced, but knows she's still attractive. Her ex-husband Peter (Gabriel Byrne) is a Columbia professor. They were married for ten years and now have one of those divorcée relationships that are supposed to be mature but are really just unhealthy. They have lunch together on campus and have regular dinners at each other's homes. Essentially, they're one of these couples who get divorced but then continue to carry on with about 80% of their married life together. Louise also has a larger-than-life best friend named Missy (Marcia Gay Harden) who lives across the country with her rich husband and scandalizes Louise with phone calls about lusting after the pool boy.One day, after rejecting a series of applicants, she's stopped short by a letter. It's from a young man named F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace) and Louise is completely taken aback by it. Even though his application isn't complete, she invites him for an interview and rather aggressively seduces him. It seems that Louise's high school boyfriend was named Scott Feinstadt. She loved him and then he died and now Louise is caught up with the wild idea her great love has returned to her. As you might guess, a budding romance between a woman and a young man she's thinks might be her dead boyfriend runs into a few snags. Louise also has to deal with a revelation from Peter that abnormally disturbs her and a simmering conflict with her recovering addict brother (Paul Rudd) before F. Scott finally finds out why Louise took a fancy to him.There are a lot of things about this movie that work on their own but when they try to put them all together, it really doesn't click.Laura Linney is splendid, as always, but she's playing facets of a character instead of a whole woman. At times she's wrapped up in a fantasy. Other times, she's got a very cold-blooded grip on reality. Sometimes she's very much in command and others she's very much affected by so many things. For a woman to so quickly and so strongly latch onto the "my dead boyfriend's come back to me" thing, she's got to be very sad and lonely and unhappy and a little pathetic. Linney tries all she can to convey all of that, but she's hampered by a story that doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit how messed up Louise must be.Topher Grace looks and feels a little too old for this role, but his performance of a young artist is spot on. He plays him as genuinely young, with a fragile sense of himself and an unsettled relationship to the world.The only unconvincing acting job of the movie is Marcia Gay Harden's, and I'm not sure it's her fault at all. Missy is less a character and more a living deus ex machina. Missy exists to facilitate the ending of this story, which means her behavior doesn't make sense as a human being but only as a servant of the Almighty Plot Hammer.There are also two things about this story that are just too cute. For one, we're never really told the whole story about Louise and her high school boyfriend. Certain things are implied and we're clearly meant to assume that it was this great and wonderful love story. But then toward the end of the movie, we're told that it was much more mundane and common and even tawdry. It's like the movie plays a trick by letting you believe in this romantic fantasy and then dumps a bucket of cold water on you. The second problem is that the whole "he's her dead high school boyfriend" thing just sort of goes away in the middle of the film. It's ignored and we get about 30 minutes of a perfectly conventional story about an older woman infatuated with a younger man but still conflicted about his youth. We also get the stuff with Peter, which seems very contrived, and the stuff with Louise's brother, which only makes sense when the movie beats us over the head with what it's supposed to mean later on.If you're a Laura Linney fan, she's just as good here as in her other films. A lot of those other films, however, are much better than this.