Short Take: Thorough in its approach, which is regurgitation

Director: Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries)

Screenwriters: Katherine Fugate (The Prince and Me, Carolina)

Cast: Ashton Kutcher (What Happens in Vegas, The Guardian), Jennifer Garner (The Invention of Lying, Juno), Anne Hathaway (Bride Wars, Rachel Getting Married), Jamie Foxx (The Kingdom, Dreamgirls), Jessica Biel (Easy Virtue, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry), Shirley MacLaine (In Her Shoes, The Apartment), Hector Elizondo (The Princess Diaries, American Gigolo)

Length: 2 hours 5 minutes

Synopsis: During Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles, a number of related characters celebrate love in all its forms.  The film mostly centers on lovesick florist Reed (Kutcher), who proposes to his girlfriend, and his interactions with the other characters throughout the day.  Reed’s best friend, Julia (Garner), decides to surprise her mysterious boyfriend.  Liz (Hathaway) is a secretary who moonlights as a phone sex operator and tries to keep it secret from her new boyfriend.  Valentine’s-hating sports agent Kara (Biel) throws a party lamenting the holiday and shares her hatred with Kelvin (Foxx), a sports newscaster forced to report on the holiday. Kate (Roberts), a soldier on leave, gets to know a handsome and friendly business man (Cooper) as she flies home to see her valentine.

Analysis: The tagline for the ensemble romantic comedy Valentine’s Day reads “A Love Story.  More or Less,” and the description is fairly accurate.  In terms of quantity, it’s more of a love story than your average romantic comedy considering it follows nearly a dozen romantic relationships.  On the other hand, it is far less romantic or poignant than films like (500) Days of Summer or another of director Garry Marshall’s films, Pretty Woman.  Rather than offering an original take on love, the film is simply a revue of various types of love.  However, the kinds of love shown in the film are not meant to reflect the reality of romantic relationships.  Rather, they are meant simply as an assemblage of the relationships typically portrayed in romantic comedies of the past.  Valentine’s Day is not meant to challenge viewers, but to reinforce their expectations.  Nevertheless, the film’s predictability is precisely what makes it enjoyable.  Audiences of every demographic can watch each story as it moves inevitably toward a happy ending, taking comfort in the fact that love will always prevail.

Each storyline seems familiar since it likely appeared in some form in previous films.  Garner’s Julia is the nice girl who always picks the wrong man instead of noticing the longtime friend standing right in front of her.  Kutcher’s Reed is the nice guy who finds the perfect girl only to realize she isn’t as perfect as he thought.  Foxx and Biel’s characters are the lonely pessimists who bond over their supposed hatred of the love-centric holiday.  Hathaway and Grace’s characters offer a watered-down version of Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.  MacLaine and Elizondo play the wizened older couple that has experienced the ups and downs of married life. There are even two takes on teen romance. Screenwriter Katherine Fugate seems to cobble the stories’ trajectories from more developed and nuanced films.  However, the film’s goal is reference and comfort not originality.

Perhaps the film’s most stunning use of reference comes when MacLaine and Elizondo’s characters meet for a kiss in front of an outdoor movie screen.  As they kiss, a younger MacLaine, whose character was an actress in earlier days, appears on the screen behind them in a passionate embrace with another actor.  The film, 1958’s Hot Spell, is a drama about a cheating spouse, which holds special relevance to MacLaine and Elizondo’s storyline within the film.  The scene makes the film’s debt to earlier cinema explicit and it is actually a remarkable moment.  The whole film, like this individual scene, is a homage to earlier depictions of love in film and while the storylines shown in the film are enjoyable in and of themselves, the fact that the are reminiscent of earlier films heightens their attraction.

Though Valentine’s Day is ostensibly about couples in love, the film’s true subject matter is reference.  Each storyline is a modified form of classic Hollywood romantic tropes.  Marshall’s film is not so much a celebration of love as it is of Hollywood’s history of portraying love.

Rating: 6.0

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