Love Happens

Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Jennifer Aniston, Dan Fogler, John Carroll Lynch, Martin Sheen

Directed by: Brandon Camp

Produced by: J. Miles Dale, Richard Solomon, Ryan Kavanaugh

Genres: Comedy, Drama and Romance

Running Time: 1 hr. 49 min

Release Date: September 18th, 2009 (wide)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language including sexual references.

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart) is a self-help guru who urges people to put tragedy behind them and get on with their lives. And that’s not easy for him to say. Ryan is still mourning the death of his wife. In flashbacks, we see a car swerving to avoid hitting a dog, and a woman being crushed.

Although Ryan is a great talker, there’s one detail about the accident that remains unspoken. That secret is at the core of “Love Happens,” a well-meaning but disappointing drama that also stars Jennifer Aniston as Eloise, a flower shop proprietor with whom Ryan would like to jump start his life.

The script by Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson (who also composed another piece of inspirational goop, “Dragonfly”) fails to make the basic premise credible. Because Burke mainly spews cliches about finding the strength to move on, it’s hard to understand how he has developed such a passionate following.

Perhaps if the film were conceived as a satire of the self-help movement, this wouldn’t matter, but we are meant to take Burke seriously as a true savant who can heal everyone but himself. But his nuggets of advice are so superficial that we never really believe in Burke’s celebrity status.

While exploring Burke’s psychological history, the film builds toward a surprise revelation that has been pretty transparent from the start. There simply isn’t enough drama to sustain a nearly two-hour movie, and Camp’s plodding direction only makes the picture seem more tedious.

The best performance comes from John Carroll Lynch as a grieving father; he coaxes the most poignant drama from the undernourished script. Frances Conroy has a brief scene as Eloise’s mother; clearly, most of her part was left on the cutting-room floor.

The film is a glossy but uninspired production, with stock shots of the Seattle Space Needle to provide a sense of place. Editor Dana E. Glauberman, who did a crack job of editing “Up in the Air,” can’t find the right pacing for this lugubrious drama.

The film bears some resemblance to “As Good As It Gets” and last summer’s “The Answer Man,” two other films about hypocritical literary lions, but it cries out for the wit that enlivened those movies.