The overhanging question is whether a two-time Academy Award-winning actress, Hilary Swank, can lighten herself into the thespian weight-class of a Sandra Bullock or a Kate Hudson. The answer seems to be no, not when the director and co-writer, Richard LaGravenese, who directed her also in Freedom Writers, is intent on sniffing out pockets of genuine emotion in a mechanical tearjerker (and laugh-jerker) about a turning-thirty widow who learns to live again under the guidance of pre-written missives from her dear departed, Gerard Butler, a life-loving, beer-chugging Irish minstrel. (“Why,” she wonders in front of the TV screen one night, “can’t I be Bette Davis?” — another two-time Academy Award-winner, but an unequalled ten-time nominee.) Swank may not be able, in a flashback to the meet-cute, to look quite like a college coed on her first tour of Europe, but she can touchingly act like one, and remind us in the process that one of her rarest gifts is her totally uncool enthusiasm. Kathy Bates, merely a one-time Academy Award-winner, has her moments, too, as Swank’s sourpuss mother. With Lisa Kudrow, Gina Gershon, and Harry Connick, Jr. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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