Catch And Release


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Catch and Release, the Jennifer Garner vehicle announced far in advance by a trailer screaming “romantic comedy,” is really something utterly different.  It is a feather-light film about loss and moving on, about love and forgiveness, about how the things we once thought to be true get woven into larger truths, and how we reconcile what we did not have in the end with what we took away from it.  Brought to the screen by established writer/first-time director Susannah York, who seems to be better praised for her lesser works (e.g., Erin Brockovich), it is compelling in its quiet and oddly self-deprecating ways.  It points out the clichés in its own words of wisdom (including the over-extended metaphor of its title), attributes its deepest thoughts to glib quotes from the backs of herbal tea boxes (Celestial S  easonings, indeed), and remains unconcerned throughout with slickness or high concepts.  For these reasons above all, and despite familiar tropes, flaws and facile moments readily enumerable, Catch and Release resonates with softness and sincerity, and washes over the viewer with an easy, comfortable charm.

The film opens with a narrative fade from celebratory white to funereal black.  In a world where thirtysomethings live like twentysomethings in the smiling, well-heeled bohemia-light of a fantasy Boulder, Colorado, a reception planned for nuptials is made over for a memorial service, the bridal gown replaced with a mourning dress, the cake untopped, the florist turned away.  As the aptly if obviously named Gray, Garner plays the not-quite-widowed half of a perfect couple torn asunder on the eve of their wedding by the would-be groom’s untimely death.  Unable to afford alone the space she and he were meant to live in together, she moves into the room that had been his in the house he shared with two of his closest friends, and within which another friend is temporarily staying.  It is a regression for all, a falling back, a clinging to what used to be heavy with juvenilia and nostalgia; but it becomes the first step in each of their letting go.

Gray, who inherits in this moment of devastation the sit-com star superficiality of having no family or friends of her own, is adored and protected by the bestest buddies of her lost love.  Earnest, pining Dennis (Sam Jaeger), teddy-bear comic relief Sam (Kevin Smith) and all-around snaky bad boy Fritz (Timothy Olyphant) take her in as if she were their own.   Her relationship with the other women tied to the fiancé she begins to find she little knew—the deliciously purse-lipped Fiona Shaw and the ditzy but endearing Juliette Lewis—is somewhat more brittle. Expected conflicts, unrequited love and unlikely romances too quickly born flow predictably from the set-up; secrets are revealed, disappointments multiplied, hopes dashed and perfect images shattered. But as each of the players finds his own way to grieve, the rom-com angles reveal themselves more as separate paths toward recovery than independent storylines. Less about Valentine dreams than about moving in to newer spaces.

Formulaic though the film is, and the writer’s long-standing commitment to barbing the obese notwithstanding, the formula yields to something surprisingly unforced in the excellent performances, each of which is more understated than the writing (at times blatantly caricatural) might suggest, or that the actors—based on their track records—might have otherwise given.   A palpable and believable vulnerability bleeds through.  And the healing feels almost real.

©2007 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene