There are typical love stories and then there are unusual romances, and this is the latter -- mainly because the leading man is dead by the end of the opening credits. How do you tell a love story without him being present? Easy. Through the memories of the woman who loved him the most: his wife.

There will be time for having children. But they need financial stability first, and a bigger apartment. That's the argument that Holly (Hilary Swank) and Gerry (Gerard Butler) have one evening after a dinner party with her mother. Lots of shouting ensues before they make up and heal, like all good married couples do. Fast forward a few months. Holly is sitting at Gerry's wake wondering what happened. How her magnificent husband could be there, perfectly healthy, one moment, and gone the next, the result of a devastating brain tumor. Crushed into an oblivion by her loss and the reality that they missed having their family when they had the chance, Holly withdraws into herself, pulls away from her friends, and becomes a recluse... until her birthday. That's when the first letter arrives, taped inside a box of birthday cake. It's from her husband, ordering her to do everything he tells her to.

First, she must go out and have a good time, learn to live a little bit and not close off her emotions. More letters will be coming and he wants her to do everything that is in them, from packing up his clothes and giving them away to making a trip to his homeland of Ireland. Through the process of learning to let go, but always adore the memories she holds dear to her heart, Holly discovers new things about herself, makes new friends, and comes to terms with her grief. That, in a nutshell, is the film in its entirety. It's not complicated. It's not even emotionally demanding. It's just an honest to goodness look at loss that somehow manages to be insanely funny. Some kinds of humor are inappropriate in a film of this genre but this one manages (for the most part) to remain believable and inviting without coming across as overly sentimental. I loved the relationship depicted between Holly and Gerry because it was not perfect. It had its ups and downs, but it also outlined the fact that together they were willing to work through anything.

They have an argument, they kiss and make up. They respect one another's opinions and want each other to be all that they can be. Even their initial meeting (her being lost in an Irish national park) was adorable. Having said that, however, the filmmakers made one humongous error of judgment that was neither believable nor particularly satisfying. They had Holly engage in a one night stand. It was neither in keeping with her character nor honorable toward the memory of her recently deceased husband. That pretty much killed the movie for me because I lost any respect I had for her. Content wise there is not a huge amount of negatives but it does earn the PG13 rating. Holly spends the first ten minutes of the film in a half slip and bra. Gerry performs a kind of funny striptease and manages to almost put his eye out with a suspender strap. Holly is shown post-sex with a man she met in a bar, but unfortunately, the audience gets to see much more of him -- including his fully naked backside. There's quite a bit of bad language, including several abuses of Jesus' name, and some sexual dialogue.

One bonus was that throughout, one of the young men who worked in the family pub was trying to get her romantic attention. I did not like him and did not want to, because compared to her loving and creative husband, he seemed like a self-centered jerk. The ending therefore surprised me, and made me pleased that it went in a new direction. It's an interesting and touching little film full of memories and genuinely riotous moments, with a good cast (Lisa Kudrow, Gina Gershon, James Marsters, Kathy Bates, Jeffrey Dean Morgan), but its one major moral hiccup kind of derailed its good intentions.