No one this side of Woody Allen caresses the special light of Manhattan, but director of photography Joaquin Baca-Asay does a terrific job lighting the colors of Morningside Heights in p.s., its unique prettiness not of artsy postcards, and that is one quiet plus of this Dylan Kidd film. The other, principal, one is Laura Linney as Louise “Lou” “Ousie” Harrington, in sight just about every minute of the movie and, impressively, only two days off the shoot of Kinsey. Sad, angry, passionate, dispirited, lonely, catty, vulnerable or simply applying a face with which to face the world, the Juilliard-trained screen-stage-TV actress almost carries this film across the goal line.

“Almost,” because the script by Kidd and Helen Schulman, from the latter’s 2001 novel which “to work on its own terms had to stop being mine and start being Dylan’s,” ultimately sidetracks its promising beginnings, does not quite decide on the direction of its romantic comedy, introduces late a major and jarring character heard earlier only as a voice, and plants too many ghost story innuendoes that are not handled and  finally dropped into thin air.

Perhaps the latter lover-reincarnated-or-not problem arises in what is the rare cinema wisdom not to use the flashback or voiceover of so many popular book adaptations. The heroine is blocked, she cannot see inside herself or others, “can’t get back to a particular time,” and thus in being true to her, the film also avoids anything beyond a pencil sketch of that first lover, who arguably reappears as such years later in the associative minds of Louise and friend-rival Missy Goldberg (Marcia Gay Harden).

Balancing this exercised prerogative to leave the past unopened, is the equally uncertain future. All is the present. While, as with any story, including those of lovers, one cannot guarantee events down the road, a generation of difference does not bode well for the long haul; Benjamin Braddock would have left Mrs. Robinson sooner or later but in fact did so for the poetic justice of her less attractive, colorless (but younger) daughter.

A Columbia University School of Fine Arts admissions officer, at thirty-nine Louise jogs on a gym treadmill, is on excellent terms with tweedy fellow faculty member ex-husband Peter (Gabriel Byrne), travels upstate weekends to put up with mother Ellie Silverstein’s (Lois Smith) wisdom and bicker with drug-rehabbing brother Sammy (Paul Rudd), talks on the phone with married sexual predator Missy, and suffers mid-life emotional and sexual blahs.

Until, that is, she conveniently runs across a misplaced application for admission and at once calls the artist to schedule a one-on-one. The application is incomplete, an omission indicative of the careless irreverent attitude of F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace, “less Jewish” than the original book’s two Scotts), but what grabs her is the name and a handwritten phrase, “just add water.” Scott Feinstadt had been the great, still enduring, crush of her early womanhood, an aspiring artist killed young but not before Missy had stolen him, anyway.

University official and applicant are soon sipping wine in her apartment and making hungry physical love -- not overdone or artsy, with even a humorous pause for “it” -- which will lead to more. Continued, any such relationship would naturally bring embarrassing complications, and Missy’s interest in the boy and Peter’s devastating revelations further cloud the issue. Scott of the present is actually “Fran” and dismisses the dead rival as artist and his memory as mere “high school.”

Talented, brutal, arrogant with youth, or insightfully frank, the young man correctly assesses the difficulties age creates for itself. Puppy love ought not to be the basis for decades-later adult crises (or a novel), “everybody goes beyond it, gets on with their life.” Topping this memory of such insubstantial stuff, there are coincidences, too many of them to disregard, and the film errs in having hinted and then dodging its hints, not as ambiguous suggestion in the women’s minds, but as though they simply never occurred at all. Concurrently, perceptive beyond belief on the phone, Harden’s late Karen Black-doing-Vampirella appearance is out of place amidst chicken-soup philosophizing about “gorgeous snowflakes.”

Fun while the fun lasted, p.s. gives out early. Too bad, for Linney’s Lou deserves better than a fling, however short. Adults would hope that, her self-pitying cruel streak vented, Lou's final rather motherly smile points to a few happy future moments. 

(Released by Newmarket Films and rated "R" for language and sexuality.)