P.S.

For those who enjoyed the heavy dialogue and charismatic mysoginy of Roger Dodger, this is Dylan Kidds followup. He is still playing within the confines of gender politics, but this movie casts a much wider net. There is an added element of the mystical in P.S. When Louise, a Columbia admissions director, is going through possible art program admissions one strikes her eye because he has the same name as a high-school boyfriend who died in a car accident. When she interviews him, she finds out he also looks the same and talks the same. She begins an affair with him (probably increasing his chances of getting in!) but they eventually have to deal with the unexplained. Complicating this Louise's ex-husband who maintains a friendship with her, and her best friend (an always brilliant Marcia Gay Harden) who is both anatagonizing her and is her conscience.
The movie is interesting because it takes a potentially science-fiction idea and treats it like a character drama. People behave like real people. The immensly talented Laura Linney plays Louise as a woman in her late thirties whose life did not go as expected and she is both self-assured and fragile at the same time. Topher Grace moves up from T.V. to give an assured performance as a self-confident young man who takes life as it goes, but has a passionate and strong moral centre. He is wise beyond his years (and beyond the cliche of that sentence).
The movie is about addiciton, art, relationships and confusion of being in something that is both familiar and new at the same time. Every relationship that you enter has echos of the past ones. The movie deals with this in both the literal and abstract way.
I liked this movie a lot, but it could be elevated by a second viewing or completely collapse.