Although p.s. is only director Dylan Kidd's second movie, one can already see patterns forming. Like his first movie, the acerbic Roger Dodger, p.s. features a central performance that showcases the skills of his main player. In the former film, Campbell Scott took charge of the scenery; here, Laura Linney gets the spotlight.

Linney, an underappreciated actress who deserves to be a household name by now, helps to confirm Kidd as an actor's director, someone who relishes strong performances and obviously delights in capturing them on film. Here, Linney plays Louise, a bitter, middle-aged woman who's due to see a light in her life, which is where Topher Grace's character, F. Scott, comes in. Bearing resemblances in both appearance and talent to Louise's deceased high school boyfriend, F. Scott's arrival into Louise's world seems like either a divine coincidence or a cosmic joke.

It doesn't take long for the two of them to get on close terms, and here Kidd savors the interaction between his two main stars. Linney and Grace are given loose, conversational dialogue that's made all the more interesting because the two characters are quite different from each other. They don't talk like each other, nor react like each other, so each of their characters are well reinforced as they play off of one another. Again, this was an element observable in Roger Dodger in the interaction between Scott and Jesse Eisenberg.

That Kidd makes his movies almost entirely character driven is appreciable, but curiously his protagonists are given simple arcs where they seem forced to learn "lessons." One weakness in Roger Dodger was how it kept showing Scott's character to be in the wrong -- it was played for laughs, but it weakened the character's dimensionality. Similarly here, Louise is continually flustered until another character spells out for her what her problem is.

This isn't inherently bad; it's just that, as far as character studies go, the complexities here are kept to a minimum, which only means there exists a potential to do more. Kidd's preference to let his main characters' actions drive the narrative is a welcome approach in today's movies, but those characters could stand to do some zigzagging down their paths. Initially, they don't have internal struggles -- instead, they're stuck in some way and require an external force to knock them over. These are interesting stories and they say something about how sometimes a person's own resolve isn't enough to make them change for the better, but they also wind up with solutions that rely too easily on the wake-up call.

Roger Dodger handled this slightly better than p.s., although p.s. provides an interesting observation about a person's penchant for drama. The wake-up call here amounts to the realization that we create our own dramas, or, perhaps more specifically, that we tend to make big deals out of things merely to give events weight and meaning that justify our own natural emotions. This might be more convincing if the premise didn't lend itself so easily to mystical interpretation, but at least the point still stands. If Kidd does enjoy presenting character studies as vehicles for lightweight self-improvement messages, at least he uses messages I can agree with.

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

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.