Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is a film that tries desperately to pander to as wide an audience as possible, while employing a mostly B-cast list and a couple of overly dramatized so-called “twists.”  I have to admit- I was pleasantly surprised after seeing this movie that I was not forced to gouge my eyes out, but there’s just not enough here to justify the existence of the film in the first place.  It is convinced, for some reason, that it breaks new ground, but really it’s all just a conglomeration of the buttons that Hollywood loves to push.  There’s the obligatory elderly tragic romance with the touching conclusion, the kinky new-age girl with the Midwestern innocent young man, and the purely neurotic “I’ll never find a man who can stand me!” woman who (gasp) finds a man that can stand her.  Some of the sub-plots fall flat on their face, like Bradley Cooper’s and Julia Robert’s long plane ride together.  And let’s not even talk about Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift (she’s funny for about thirty seconds and then just banal).  Quite simply, there’s absolutely nothing at stake in these kinds of scenarios, and the script/actors give us little reason to care about what happens to either party.

The writers of this film obviously didn’t care to give themselves or their characters many obstacles to overcome.  Looking for character arcs or serious transformations?  Don’t even try it here.  The only story that has the potential of being emotionally satisfying at its ending is the main storyline shared by Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner, but all of that potential is wasted in the last third or so of the film, when all pretenses of gravity are abandoned.  Ashton’s character, though, for once, is actually something new that’s a breath of fresh air.  Instead of being cast as a cocky 70s player, a cocky newlywed, or a cocky newlywed in Vegas, here he plays a chronically optimistic hero, the only one who seems legitimately energized by the holiday.  Indeed, most of the other storylines in the film could have taken place during any time of the year, but Kutcher’s storyline is firmly anchored to the namesake of the movie.  In the end, the “surprising” connections between multiple storylines (something that is always expected in an ensemble film like this) are almost laughable, leading one to wonder if the movie wouldn’t have been vastly better if it had just focused on one of the storylines.

One of the most annoying things about this film is its message.  No matter what your opinion of the holiday itself, you have to admit that it’s impossible to try and assert that everyone is happy on Valentine’s Day.  Yet this is exactly what the movie attempts to do.  Only two characters in the film end up without a significant other, and these two are simply plot fodder, needed as ways to advance the story and create everlasting happiness for our two leads.  In the aforementioned old couple storyline, after going through a rough patch that occupies about two minutes of the film, the obligatory reconnection moment consists of the woman (the one who has committed the relationship infraction) insisting “You’ll forgive me!  Because that’s what people do!” Really?  I wasn’t aware that forcing people to forgive you really qualified for Valentine’s Day romance.  This is not an isolated incident; this sort of narrow, shallow thinking permeates much of the dialogue and character interactions.  I left the theater feeling like I had been force-fed a mess of flat romance and pointless storytelling.  Most of these stories should have been left on the drawing board.  Unfortunately for us, they weren’t.

-Brian