To Gillian on her 37th Birthday

I seem to be catching up with movies I somehow missed when they were released at the Box Office or on DVD. This weekend I watched To Gillian on Her 37^th Birthday, starring the handsome Peter Gallagher, the beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer, and the delightful Claire Danes as the teen-aged daughter trying to survive with her father after the death of her mother. The father, played by Peter Gallagher, can’t seem to let go of his deceased wife.

 It was a great cast that was pleasant to watch. Kathy Baker played the intrusive aunt who was pushing to take custody of her deceased sister’s daughter while the father got his act together. It was a pleasant enough movie, especially the scenes of the ocean surrounding Nantucket, but it was also full of Hollywood stereotypes. There was the beach house on Nantucket, the unhappy childless married couple who would have had children if they had had “something to celebrate in their marriage,”  the grieving husband who was carrying on a relationship with his dead wife, and the predictable happy ending. No doubt none of the people involved in making this film lead lives like this, but the movie was written to portray something the average Midwesterner could understand and respond to emotionally.

Since I began writing fiction of my own, I find it more difficult to enjoy movies that are somewhat formulaic. I expect more from storytelling. But it’s stories like this that sell, and, if I got nothing else from this movie, I did receive the lesson of how to write a crowd-pleasing story. But it also provided a couple of hours of easy entertainment, and the opportunity to be swept away in somebody else’s drama in a spectacular ocean setting, complete with postcard perfect sunsets.

Kathy Holmes
www.kathyholmes.net

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