A rattletrap contrivance built around a Labor Day weekend that doubles, or triples, as the birthday and deathday of the titular Gillian, whose surviving husband (Peter Gallagher) still clings to her memory two years after her header from the highest point on a sailboat. (Suggested alternative title, with apologies to Richard Henry Dana: Two Years after the Mast.) What's more, the widower continues to meet and talk with the deceased (Michelle Pfeiffer, more skeletal than ghostly) by schmaltzy moonlight and shimmering sea. His meddlesome sister (the more deserving Kathy Baker) chooses this sensitive occasion to try to fix him up with an attractive divorcee (the also more deserving Wendy Crewson) and, when that gambit finds a frosty reception, to announce her intention to initiate a custody fight over her teenage niece (Claire Danes, whose puckered-forehead act has already grown old). Romantics hungering for a love that stretches to the Other Side would be better off re-seeing Portrait of Jennie. With Bruce Altman and Freddie Prinze, Jr.; directed by Michael Pressman. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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