What is it about Los Angeles that eludes filmmakers? Of the many attempts to capture the urban character of this fair metropolis, only two come to mind that achieve any sort of success: Swingers and L.A. Story, both of which deliver the city’s foibles, and qualities, with a knowing wink. The recent effort by director Marc Webb in (500) Days of Summer resulted in a schizoid personality switch with New York; fail. And now, New Yorker Garry Marshall ostensibly aims to make Valentine’s Day a love-letter to L.A.; he succeeds in giving the ten-cent postcard tour of the city instead. Along with scriptwriters, he also manages to gloss over the GLBT community. For a film billed as a day in the life of love, gay characters are safely shunted aside to avoid offending heterosexual sensibilities, but not too far aside for the film to be accused of societal blindness and insensitivity. But that’s par for a script that often makes the safest, most predictable decisions when confronted with the possibility of risk. That’s called marketing. Some would say it’s very L.A., but that sentiment would also fit on a ten-cent postcard.
Katherine Fugate essentially aims to do for romance in L.A. what Crash attempted with race relations; chart the currents and eddies of turbulent obsessions. Of the two films, Valentine’s Day comes up smelling like roses if only because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t indulge a contrived ambiguity paraded as profound insight. Unfortunately, the rom-com compulsion to slather sugar on raw emotional wounds takes away from any credible insight into love the film claims for itself, the strange, warped reality of the romantic comedy, call it twee-ality, never leaves any doubt that the characters are game pieces. Characters are carefully maneuvered from stings and kisses to other stings and kisses, until the whole affair gives in to the moralistic impulse to give everybody what’s coming to them. One can’t begrudge a romantic comedy for putting a tidy little ribbon with an oversized bow on the plot, but one can quibble with how the by-the-numbers pseudo-complexity of the film suffers from a case of quantity over quality. A cast of thousands, in other words, isn’t an asset. Superfluous additions like high school lovey-doveys goofily played by Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner add nothing, nor does the wet squib of a story involving an army captain (Julia Roberts) returning home for a brief shore-leave and striking up a conversation with a handsome fellow passenger. Those stories that hold a glimmer of interest are snuffed out by the stuffiness of too many characters enacting too many familiar scenarios.
So Valentine’s Day is just drugstore candy, easily consumed, fleetingly enjoyable, and with little to show for the effort but an empty box. But for all that, Valentine’s Day is more greeting card than Shakespearean sonnet, the film does have moments to make a Grinch’s heart glow, thanks to the blend of star-power and a token effort to add complications and humour on the road to happily ever after. It’s certainly a more infectious and funny outing than the year’s first effort at romance, Leap Year; a pleasing sugar rush before the crash.
Entertainment: * (out of two)
Craft: * (out of two)
Valentine’s Day. Directed by Garry Marshall. Written by Katherine Fugate. Starring: lots of famous people. 124 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some sexual material and brief partial nudity)
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