A scene from ‘Love Happens’

You’d think “Love Happens” is a rom-com but it’s actually more of drama than comedy. The lead character is Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart of “Erin Brokovich,” “No Reservations”), the writer of a book called “A-Okay,” a self-help manual for people mourning for a loved one. The movie starts with him arriving in Seattle to be the motivational speaker in his seminar on how to move on after losing someone. He and his late wife used to live there and one of the persons who confront him is his wife’s estranged dad (Martin Sheen), who calls him a hypocrite.

In his hotel, a florist catches his interest, Eloise (Jennifer Aniston). He tries to invite her for coffee but she responds in sign language. It turns out she’s not really deaf but just pretending to be one as she already has a boyfriend, who she quickly discovers to be cheating on her. Burke discovers she can actually speak and reprimands her for this. After their first rocky encounter, they’re soon dating each other.

The movie’s title, “Love Happens,” is obviously a play on the term “shit happens.” And shit does happen on the way to the film’s ultra mushy climax showing Burke breaking down on stage confessing his “crime” with his father-in-law also going up on stage to console him. This weeper of a sequence is almost unwatchable because of its sheer manipulativeness. The movie is the directorial debut of Brandon Camp, who previously wrote the sappy “Dragonfly” with Kevin Costner also pining for a missing wife.

What saves the movie is the highly competent performance of Eckhart as Burke (he was also good in “Dark Knight”) investing his character with much sympathy and humanity. He conducts his seminar scenes well. We’ve just noticed the motivational speaker is a favorite in Hollywood films, like Tom Cruise in “Magnolia,” Greg Kinnear in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Terence Stamp in “Yes Man,” and soon, George Clooney in “Up in the Air.”

Aniston knows she’s more of a support as the catalyst who’s fond of writing uncommon words on hotel walls and helps bring about Burke’s catharsis. She wisely underplays her performance. Since “Friends,” we notice she’s been doing movies that will certainly not help boost her career, like “Derailed,” “Rumor Has It,” “Friends with Money,” and “Management.”

The best performance in the film is rendered by John Carroll Lynch as a father who has a hard time coping with feelings of guilt and loss over the death of his young son. Judy Greer as Eloise’s wacky best friend is not properly utilized. The feel-good ending is not really provided by any of the lead characters since the romance between Burke and Eloise is not that fully developed. Believe it or not, it’s provided by a crowd-pleasing parrot named Rocky.

What the movie succeeds in doing (which even “Sleepless in Seattle” failed to do) is to make a travelogue showing various scenic spots in Seattle, including a beautiful shot of the Space Needle with the camera zooming away from it while Burke is on top. If you haven’t seen Seattle, this is the best way to discover it, including the graveyard where Bruce Lee and his son Brandon were laid to rest.

A sort of sappy entertainment

Those familiar with the filmed novels of Nicholas Sparks like “Message in a Bottle,” “A Walk to Remember” and “Night in Rodanthe” know that his works are sentimental romances that manipulate our emotions with tragedy when someone dies. No doubt there’s a big market for this sort of sappy entertainment, which is the reason why “Dear John,” Sparks’ latest filmed work, manage to dislodge “Avatar” from the US box-office charts after lording it on top for several weeks.

The story is about a Special Forces soldier on leave, John Tyree (Channing Tatum), and a pretty college girl on spring vacation, Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried), who meet in March 2001 in South Carolina. A chance encounter between them is transformed into a two-week whirlwind romance. But he has to return to service. By then, they’ve fallen deeply in love and continue their relationship through letters. Until John suddenly gets a letter from Savannah saying she wants to end the relationship.

But of course, there’s a twist in this kind of story. Suffice it to say that it turns out not to be the usual Sparks’ material that requires weepers to consume a lot of tissue paper. Maybe because it’s directed by Lasse Hallstrom, whose “My Life As a Dog” won the best foreign language film Oscar years ago and later got nominated again for his screen adaptation of “The Cider House Rules” and “Chocolat.” It’s still schmaltzy melodrama with some of the characters doing a lot of personal sacrifice for other characters, but done with more restraint. In the end, they even have a Star Cinema kind of conclusion where the concerned parties meet again after some years for the obligatory happy ending.

The first part of the movie showing how John and Savannah meet by chance and how their love story develops is pretty watchable. The second act becomes tedious and suffers from monotony showing them separated from each other exchanging correspondence by snail mail. This is spiced up with montage shots accompanied by cheesy songs.

It perks up when John returns home after the bombing of the World Trade Center (the terrorists who did that are the real villains here) and they finally make love with each other in the barn, just like Piolo and Angel in “Love Me Again,” but executed without eroticism. After that, it’s back to boredom with the movie also focusing on John’s relationship with his father (Richard Jenkins, who’s quite touching here), a quiet, reclusive coin collector who compulsively bakes meatloaf on Saturdays and lasagna on Sundays.

The film is basically redeemed by the generally believable acting of the leads. We first saw Amanda Seyfried in the TV series “Big Love” where she already displayed fine emoting, and later in “Mamma Mia” where she held her own against Meryl Streep and in “Jennifer’s Body” where she made mincemeat of Megan Fox. She gives a quiet but winning performance here as a young woman who has to make a crucial decision for the sake of an autistic boy and his sick dad (Henry Thomas, the former child actor in “E.T.”).

Channing Tatum won fans as a dancer in “Step Up” and as an action star in “G.I. Joe.” Here, he manages to show that he can also do drama credibly as the heartbroken young soldier confused by his girlfriend’s decisions, especially in his breakdown scene with his father at the hospital.