‘LOVE Happens” is a weepie about the grieving process, mainly my own. Two hours of my life have been brutally stolen from me, and I need closure. So here goes.
Aaron Eckhart plays one of those sleazy cliché-spouting mountebanks who inexplicably fill hotel ballrooms with applauding morons eager to hear room-temperature clichés. Except here he’s a hero.
His big topic is coping with the loss of a loved one. My notebook only has about 50 pages, so I ran out of room, but among the pellets of wisdom this movie presents are the following: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. (No, I’m serious.) Happiness is a state of mind. When one thing ends, something else begins.
PHOTOS: JEN ANISTON AND HER LEADING MEN
Burke (Eckhart) meets a florist (Jennifer Aniston), literally by bumping into her in the hallway of his hotel. After initially blowing him off (she pretends to be mute), she gets flowers and an invitation to dinner from him, and suddenly she’s all purring and smiles. They wave their pretty hair at each other.
Cute movie stuff happens. She rents a cherry picker to take him to see a rock concert, because standing in a cold metal bucket 30 feet above the ground for two hours has got to be fun. She leaves odd words (like “quidnunc”) scribbled on a wall for no discernible reason.
At Burke’s seminar, which lasts an entire week, or almost as long as this movie, people hold a “candle of truth” and let spill with the intimacies. Says a woman of her dead fella: “I made a mold of his, um . . . you know. That way when he was gone we could still . . . you know.” Thanks, I didn’t need to know. People walk over coals and Burke heals a former contractor, who lost his son, with a Home Depot shopping spree.
Burke is tight-lipped about the details of his wife’s death in a car accident, setting up a third-act reveal that isn’t surprising (the only reason you won’t have guessed it in advance is if you think it’s too obvious) and doesn’t change anything important.
Writer-director Brandon Camp wouldn’t be able to get a job writing parking tickets if he hadn’t been born into the movie business. His father, Joe Camp, created the profitable “Benji” dog movies in the 1970s.
Even his title is unfortunate, carrying a reminder of a popular bumper-sticker phrase that also ends with “happens” but begins with a different four-letter word. Come to think of it, that would have made a far more accurate label for this film.