LOVE HAPPENS Review

Do you ever wonder what really goes on in Martha Stewart's home? Is she secretly leaving a messy house and eating boxes of macaroni and cheese? How about the relationship experts? Do they sit home dateless on the weekends, but think they know how to fix your love life? Does Ty Pennington have a house with things breaking down in it? Love Happens tells the story of a self-help guru who can't seem to get his own act together. And that's all I could think of watching the movie, "Doctor, heal thyself!"

The movie does nothing to shield us from that irony and even goes as far as to set the story up so that we'll notice how much of a screw-up/fraud this guy is. Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart) has written a bestseller about how to deal with loss after losing his wife in a car accident three years ago. His first chapter is about making lemonade from lemons, instead of wearing a sour face. Chapter two is about drinking alcohol being no more a cure-all than pouring alcohol in a bullet wound. Yet inside, he's slicing lemons in his hotel room and putting them in the vodka he's drinking straight up.

Burke is in Seattle to teach a several-day seminar and everyone has all their faith and money in him, but no one realizes he still hasn't dealt with his own loss yet. The only people that know are his father-in-law (Martin Sheen) and his manager, Lane (Dan Fogler). Burke ignores his father-in-law's pleas, and while Lane knows everything that's going on, he doesn't care so much, as for him it's all business as he tries to work a multimedia deal out of Burke's success.

Complicating matters is that while Burke should be dealing with his loss once and for all, just as he's telling those attending his seminar to do, he's captured by a local florist, Eloise (Jennifer Aniston), who at first refuses to give him the time of day by lying and saying she was a deaf mute via sign language. As a writer he's intrigued by her, as she goes around writing unique words that she finds on the walls of the hotel behind pictures. It's even more irony as the first word he finds is QUIDNUNC, a person who meddles in the affairs of others, and he meddles in all her affairs trying to figure out what she's up to writing words on hotel walls.

All the right pieces were there for this to be a really good movie, but it just never seemed to connect to go there. There were some big misfires in the movie. I thought the relationship between Eloise and Burke was really sweet, yet it wasn't the emotional draw for me like it should have been, per the movie title. Instead, the story of Burke's loss and truth behind it is where the real story is, and while the two connect, it's hard to concentrate on that as well as the romance. Burke spends so much of the movie being such a martyr and so miserable, it's hard to walk away from this and say what a sweet love story it was.