P.S.

(Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2.8.2005)

It's hardly fair to beat a filmmaker with the yardstick of his/her previous work, but Dylan Kidd's P.S. is woefully misconceived in nearly every way that made his debut feature Roger Dodger snap and sparkle. There are sequences of sexual warfare bursting with nasty wit and insight but P.S. takes a wispy, overtly-literary dramatic conceit and doesn't find a coherent, or even remotely plausible, way to externalize it.

However, the pieces are there. Laura Linney's central character, an admissions director at Columbia University who becomes inexplicably obsessed with a prospective student (Topher Grace), is surrounded by characters struggling with various demons of their own (a brother with drugs, an ex-husband with extramarital philandering). But Linney's problem is that she's still hung up on a long-ago relationship that met an abrupt end. This would have been fine, had Kidd presented her internal dilemma with a little more editorial distance. It's hard to empathize with a quixotic central character that instead comes off as a borderline nutcase.

Kidd treats supporting characters, bursting with dramatic possibility, with utter contempt and asks us to accept foolish recklessness as nobly bittersweet, turning a potentially cutting examination of a woman hamstrung by lost dreams into a frustrating and unbelievable attempt at romantic comedy.

There are striking elements, though, including a remarkable scene where Linney stands Grace in front of a mirror and prognosticates a future of middle-aged humiliation and regret. Grace's likeably natural performance is an oasis amongst this collection of uninteresting characters. He's the only person in P.S. that remotely resembles an actual human being (which may or may not have been the point) and it's to his credit that he makes that contrast possible.

Sony's DVD is relatively light on special features. There's a commentary by Kidd and D.P. Juaquin Baca-Asay and a handful of understandably-deleted scenes. Kidd's uncertainty with the material is apparent upon listening to his commentary. He admits almost immediately that his choice to soft-pedal the reincarnation angle of the story may have been the wrong choice. (Many of the story's is-he-or-isn't-he beats may have been helped by a little bit of the "mysticism" that Kidd eschews.)

The commentary is otherwise interesting, if only for hearing about Kidd's process and intentions, but his decision not to rely on the novel's internal voiceover may have hamstrung him the most. He may not have wanted to make a Tarkovsky film, as he explains on the track, but he inadvertently took the audience out of the central character's head. One can only hope for better results from Kidd's next effort. -- Jason Comerford