"Love Happens" -- and it stinks - Love Happens

Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston stumble through this claustrophobic grief-fest masquerading as a romance

By Stephanie Zacharek

Eloise (Jennifer Aniston) and Burke (Aaron Eckhart )

Topics:Love Happens, Jennifer Aniston, Movies

“Love Happens” isn’t a romantic comedy, and maybe it would be more effective, or at least just livelier, if it were. Instead, it’s a limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative. Maybe there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes in a movie theater, but right now I can’t think of one.

Aaron Eckhart plays Burke — that’s his first name — an earnest-looking grief guru who runs popular seminars designed to help people get over the loss of a loved one. The seminars grew out of a book he wrote as he attempted to grapple with his own wife’s accidental death. The book became a bestseller; the hitch is that it didn’t really help Burke kick his own grief habit. He still hasn’t adjusted to life without his wife, and he still feels guilt over her loss. It doesn’t help that her ex-Marine father (played by Martin Sheen) does stuff like march up to Burke during one of his seminars and kick him in the pants — figuratively speaking — for being so cowardly about accepting the reality of his wife’s death.

Into this cheery scenario bursts Jennifer Aniston’s Eloise, a florist who supplies arrangements for the Seattle hotel where Burke is holding his latest seminar. Burke has a chance encounter with her, in a hotel hallway, that intrigues him; when he sees her again, he asks her out. She rebuffs him by pretending to be deaf. Later, when he calls her out on her lie, she cuts him down with a speech about how he’s probably just another married businessman, in town for a few days and looking for a fling. Ouch. But she has a good excuse: She’s just broken up with her boyfriend after discovering he’s been cheating on her. Humans do the darnedest things.

It takes forever and a day for Burke and Eloise to even get to their first date. And, strangely, there are very few scenes featuring the two of them together: Most of the air in “Love Happens” is sucked up by the grieving process, as we watch Burke’s seminar attendees attempt to put their lives back together. Their grief is painful: You can see it, in particular, in the case of Walter (John Carroll Lynch), a contractor who lost his son in an accident. But director Brandon Camp — this is his directorial debut, and he co-wrote the script with Mike Thompson — lavishes so much attention on the grief stuff that he seems to forget he has potential lovers in his movie too. The movie strokes that grief chord over and over again, to the point of being fetishistic, playing on the emotions of anybody who’s ever lost a loved one, in a way that feels claustrophobic and dishonest. I kept counting the minutes until I could escape its cloying, self-helpy vapors.

The bummer is that “Love Happens” feels slightly alive when Eckhart and Aniston are on-screen together. Eckhart has given effortlessly appealing performances in pictures like “Erin Brockovich” and “Possession.” But he does need to be loosened up a bit: Left to his own devices, he has a buttoned-up, Dudley Do-Right quality. Aniston can be annoying as hell as an actress, but when she’s good, she gives off a nice, flinty spark. In “Love Happens,” these two misfire in every way possible, but in the rare moments we get to watch them together, they at least seem like two human beings attempting to connect.

But “Love Happens” isn’t just about recovering from loss and once again finding love. It’s also about the process of examining and reexamining feelings until they’ve been worn down to mere scraps, like bits of blanket obsessively fingered by a child. During the course of the movie Burke fulfills a long-neglected promise he made to his late wife: While she was alive, she asked him to free her pet “parrot,” Rocky, into the wild if anything should ever happen to her. Eloise tells Burke he needs to do right by his late wife, and by Rocky. And so Burke dutifully steals the bird from the in-laws (who have been caring for it, somewhat grudgingly, since Burke skipped out on his promise) and sets it free in the forest.

Although I’m no bird expert, a quick Google Image search confirms something I suspected: The bird in question isn’t a parrot, but a cockatiel. I also suspect that it’s not really a good idea to release a domesticated tropical bird into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, but what do I know? If Camp had been too persnickety about the parrot/cockatiel’s needs, he wouldn’t have been able to avail himself of this nifty plot point. The parrot/cockatiel isn’t, by the way, seized and eaten. No harm befalls him, which is a very good thing: He’s the only character in “Love Happens” worth caring about, because in his forthright, honest bird state, he never unduly milks our sympathy. Love does happen. But even when it’s painful, it shouldn’t hurt this much.

: Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek

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Neenah Pickett's plan to find a husband in a year didn't work -- but it shouldn't be called a failure

By Kate Harding

Topics:Love Happens, Broadsheet

About 53 weeks ago, Neenah Pickett launched a year-long husband-landing project at the blog 52 Weeks 2 Find Him. As she wrote in a recent post, prior to the project, she had “over a decade of experience of doing nothing to find a husband. From the time I was 22 years old through the age of 36, I didn’t spend any effort on finding love. I lived a very full life. I had lots of friends, was social and active in my community, and even volunteered on a regular basis. I had a great job, yet didn’t spend any more or less hours at work than any of the other people my age in NYC. But in those 14 years, I had only 2 dates.” So Pickett decided to put serious effort into dating for a year, in hopes of finding a man to spend her life with — and, as you do, she chronicled the experience online.

The year is now over, and Neenah Pickett is still single. Turns out hard work and determination won’t necessarily bring you love by a certain deadline — go figure. There’s no doubt that Pickett’s predictable failure to meet her goal leaves her open to snarking and scolding galore. Everyone knows you can’t hurry love, that trying too hard will ruin everything. Everyone knows The One only turns up when you’re not looking. Everyone knows women who admit they want to get married come across as desperate and off-putting. And P.S., everyone knows a successful career gal should be happy alone, and if she’s not, that means feminism’s a bust and women should just admit that they’d all be happier back in their traditional roles as full-time wives and mothers.

Everyone knows a lot of things that grossly oversimplify the human desire for love and the nature of attraction, much of that “knowledge” revolving around the theme that women are peculiarly needy and, if they wish to date men, must focus all their energy on pretending they’re not. (Lesbians, of course, have their choice of equally needy partners — fire up the U-Haul!) The only way you’ll get a man to commit to you is if you act like it’s the furthest thing from your mind — which means your best bet is to focus on being as pretty, charming and non-threatening as possible and, once a potential love is on the horizon, never doing anything that might spook him, like admitting what you want out of a relationship.

Funny how that dovetails with long-standing gender roles and sexist expectations, although it’s now dressed up as the self-respecting, even vaguely feminist choice — only the most pathetic, unenlightened woman would openly act like she might be happier in a committed relationship, right? Even if she’s pretty sure she would. Saying you want a man because you happen to be straight and lonely is just too dangerously close to saying you need one and single-handedly sending women back to the dark ages! It’s much safer for your own heart and indeed the sisterhood if you squelch your desires and wait patiently for someone to come along and deem you dateworthy. Just as women have always been trained to do, but never mind that. (Perhaps the popularity of “The Rules” can be explained by the simple fact that it gives women something to do while furiously pretending we’re doing nothing.)

That Neenah Pickett remains husband-free after knocking herself out to change that status can — and no doubt will — be presented as further evidence that desperation is the ultimate turn-off and playing hard to get is the only viable option for women who wish to be got. But focusing on her marital status means ignoring what she did achieve in the last 52 weeks. She went on over 30 dates — some of which she describes as “awesome” — gaining new insight into her preferences and her own behavior. In her final post of the project, she says, “I found courage, I found friendship, and I found acceptance. I shared what was on my heart hoping that it would resonate with a few. But as it turns out, there were many — thousands all across the globe.” Hmm, that doesn’t sound so bad to me. “I also learned more than I bargained for, from how to treat others, and when to trust myself, to finding peace in the midst of hurt. I also learned to laugh a lot (especially at myself), and discovered ways to create adventures, so that I could hurdle burnout and the mundane.” Neither does that. And how about this? “These 52 weeks will go down in my personal history books as one of the best years ever!”

Neenah Pickett’s experiment can be seen as a cautionary tale for women who get it into their silly heads that admitting what they want and going after it are good ideas. But it can just as easily be seen as an inspiration: Whether or not abandoning passivity and pretense will lead you to The One, it can lead to laughter, new friendships, greater self-awareness and having one of the best years of your life. Is it just me, or does that sound like a lot more fun than sitting on your hands, waiting to be pursued?

: Kate Harding is the co-author of "Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body" and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet. More Kate Harding