Valentine’s Day

Garry Marshall, that wonderful, old man brings the saccharine melodrama of television (having produced Happy Days, Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley) yet again to the screen in this lesser twin of Richard Curtis’ Love Actually.

The film begins with narration from Romeo Midnight, a fictional radio disc jockey, spanning the sights, sounds and Joe Mantegna hurling PG insults from his car at a driver for a local florist, Siena Bouquet. There’s something oddly familiar about the whimsical introduction to the disconnected city of jaded people, but I’ll come back to that. Reed Bennett (Ashton Kutcher), the owner of Siena Bouquet, and his girlfriend, Morley Clarkson (Jessica Alba)—two people whose names sound exactly like they’ve been conceived for this movie—are the central story, on the periphery of which lie several other couple’s subplots.

The idea of Los Angeles as an epicenter for the star-crossing of souls is a theme recycled so often, but rarely as cleverly as L.A. Story, written by the wryly observant Steve Martin. While this film panders to pedestrian aphorism, Mr. Martin sublimely dissected it, “All I’m saying is that, when I’m around you, I find myself showing off, which is the idiot’s version of being interesting.” To wit, Kelvin Moore (Jamie Foxx), is a TV sports reporter—substituting for Mr. Martin’s character, Harris Telemacher. While Harris observed relationships from his inner voice, Kelvin is assigned to be the man on the street for the upcoming St. Valentine’s Day. It’s an unusual assignment for a sports reporter, but clearly gives the storytellers an opportunity to make Kelvin connect entirely unrelated threads including one that works directly to his own advantage and the film’s twist-centric conclusion. In other words, three writers couldn’t figure out between them how to make the individual stories flow together in a larger narrative stream.

Naturally, then, the first twenty or thirty minutes seem aimless, just introducing us to several couples via mornings of small talk, but the story abruptly clicks into place in the second act, as relationships start to unravel and we realize, ah yes, this is the Find Your Soul Mate paint-by-numbers plot. Someone will cheat or be cheated upon, another person will just not be right, another will have to decide whether or not he can handle being with a phone sex operator…

Mostly riddled with platitudes about love, or at least the material gestures thereof if not the other 364 days of effort that make a relationship work, the film occasionally has a cute or thoughtful moment. A young boy, Edison (Bryce Robinson), is in love. Consulting the wisdom of his teacher, Julia (Jennifer Garner), and we quickly learn who his secret crush is. Julia is herself the subject of an affair with Dr. Harrison Copeland (Patrick Dempsey), whose name belongs on General Hospital, and her radar for these things is a bit faulty.

Edison is a likeable, precocious child. He’s analytical and determined, but he’s also a staple of these stories because he possesses an ambition and awareness about his situation that reads exactly as if it were an adult writer thinking his thoughts for him. It’s cute, but it’s half-baked. When his mother returns from a long journey to embrace her son, understandably economical with her words, it’s one of the few sincere moments in the film. This is owed to the calibre of actor, whom I suspect had some input in a story that otherwise, too often, meanders insincerely around the edges of infidelity or misguided infatuations.

Hector Elizondo and Shirley MacLaine also appear as Edgar and Estelle—a former Hollywood starlet—at the other end of the age spectrum, as a weathered couple. Their conundrum, as improbable as the others, relies on Critical Word Avoidance—the one thing that, if said, would resolve everything in a heartbeat, but is withheld purely to manufacture drama.

Sean Jackson (Eric Dane) is a football player near retirement. He’s handsome, has a beach house and is a football superstar. There’s talk of his retirement. He seems bored with his house, his gorgeous neighbors and a sport he’s achieved everything he set out to. What will his next adventure be? This is where Kelvin comes in and starts to bring it all together. I won’t reveal how all the threads are connected, for those who really think it’s worth paying full price to see the same rom-com they’ve watched dozens of times before. But, be warned, the result is sort of anti-climactic, except for the shot of his beloved brushing a rose against his cheek just before entering the frame for our discovery. However gimmicky the twist, the shot of the two together at last is effectively touching.

What, ultimately, is the moral to the story? It’s that if you’re good-looking and employed (or ever were, as in Estelle’s case) in a very lucrative profession, you are destined to find that special someone, right after finding the wrong special someone. If, however, you’re like many of the peripheral characters—fat, homely or Asian—then you’re purely out of luck. Isn’t it convenient that the gay couple that ends up together is quite photogenic and wealthy? Isn’t it odd that a mainstream rom-com progressive enough to feature a homosexual pair still resorts to using poor Mr. Pham, the stereotypical flamboyant Asian florist, for lowbrow comedy relief?

Where’s Burt Bachrach or Leonard Cohen when you need him?

Valentine’s Day • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 • Running Time: 125 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual material and brief partial nudity. • Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures