Valentine’s Day (2010) – on rental. Film director Garry Marshall has produced several romantic drama hits, including Pretty Woman that spiraled Julia Roberts to stardom and a Best Actress award, and the two The Princess Diaries films (first was great, second was really awful).
His most recent film this year – Valentine’s Day – had something big going for it: its huge ensemble of some of the most well-known and prettiest to look at acting leads from modern day dramas. The list includes Jennifer Garner, Julia Roberts, Anna Hathaway, Jessicas Alba and Biel – you could had made a film comprising just screen saver images of these first five actresses alone and it would had been a box-office hit – Queen Latifah, Patrick ‘McDreamy’ Dempsey, Eric ‘McSteamy’ Dane, Topher Grace, Jamie Foxx, and Ashton Kutcher.
Even Marshall stalwarts like Héctor Elizondo are in the roster to accompany Roberts and Hathaway, as are veteran actresses Kathy Bates and Shirley MacLaine. And interestingly, despite the the mega salary wattage a cast like this would had required, the film was made for a reasonably small budget of 52 million dollars.
Unfortunately, despite the huge talent assembled for this production and that several of the actors listed above are some of our generation’s finest – including Foxx, Roberts, Hathaway, and Grace – Valentine’s Day turned out to be the most hackneyed, tiresome, and pointless exercise I’ve experienced from film this year. Even Ling thought the film was awful, and she’s supposed to be the target audience for sappy romantic dramas like these.
The film in both terms of style and theme is similar to Richard Curtis’ Love Actually from a decade earlier on, even if Marshall’s new film has none of its wit. The events of Valentine’s Day takes place on the one day, with each of the ensemble playing a character which, as the story unfolds, are interrelated to each other.
To the film’s credit, the multiple story threads that are all occurring simultaneously on the Day aren’t difficult to follow. What is hard to stomach though is the long string of character relations and coincidences the film expects you to accept. A is the lover of B whose cousin C is teaching in a school which D attends and whose grandparents E and F are actually A’s employer sort of thing.
Half of such a string would had been fine. But extended as long as it is in this film, many of which absolutely not only make no sense but worse still, has no significant bearing on the story, left me concluding that the attempts to interrelate character back-stories and film story arcs were introduced only to convince audiences the presence of depth where there was in reality none.
And the numerous subplots upon subplots… few of them are resolved satisfactorily, most of them are pointless, and with the exception of one involving a phone sex operation none of them are original. You’ve seen them all before in other romantic film dramas or in TV serials, but never so over-simplified until it becomes so trite.
The film’s only saving grace comes from individual actor performances. With so large a roster though and despite the film’s relatively long run length of two hours for a romantic drama, each actor only has so much screen time. A good part of the film though is centered on two best friends Julia (Garner) and Reed (Kutcher) below, and at the film’s end you would at least get a good sense of what the two characters are about, if at the expense of everybody else’s character which amounts to just filler.
Individual performances are mixed, though the men seem to fare far worse than the women. Jamie Foxx, Patrick Dempsey, Eric Dane, and Ashton Kutcher are just lethagic. Even Héctor Elizondo, an actor whose nuanced performances in The Princess Bride was more memorable than Julia Andrew’s in the same film, acts in this film like the walking dead. The one male actor who seems able to make the best of what he has is Topher Grace, an actor whose roles are always naturally likable no matter the source material.
As for the women, Jessica Alba doesn’t have much to do and she’s only in the film for about three scenes for the male audience to ogle at. Julia Roberts plays a somewhat different type of role than normal as a military officer returning home and shows remarkable restraint in her scenes in a confined airplane. Garner with her naturally expressive eyes and overt facial features comes close to overplaying the emotions called upon in her scenes, but she has a marvelous scene about pig testicles set in a restaurant. And Hathaway with her pearly white teeth turns in what I think is the film’s best scenes when she moonlights as a phone sex operator, and in different language accents even.
So, it’s the women who salvaged a little from this turkey of a film and in my scorebook the only reason why the film scored one and not zero stars. Watch this film to see an exercise of how potentially amazing a film could had been, but crashed and burned in practice.
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