Ray Pride

So I'm telling a friend about "Catch and Release," the bittersweet romantic comedy that's "Erin Brockovich" screenwriter Susannah Grant's debut as a director. She stops me: "Romantic comedy. Jennifer Garner. You liked it. But is it any good?" (A swift punch to a soft spot.)

Why do people want to hate romantic comedies? A few minutes into the Boulder, Colorado-set "Catch and Release," we're just getting our bearings, and it's soon apparent that what was meant to be a wedding has in fact turned into a wake: Gray's (Garner) fiancée, Grady, was killed in an accident a few days earlier. (The likeness of the names is never noted in the movie.) A trio of Grady's friends, each with their own attraction to Gray, try to comfort her: stalwart stick-in-the-mud and fly-fishing-shop partner of the late man, Dennis (Sam Jaeger); Fritz, a Los Angeles film director (Timothy Olyphant), who barges into the bathroom for a quickie with another mourner while Gray cries in the shower; and in a slightly slapstick but charming turn, Kevin Smith as Sam, a Celestial Seasonings-motto engineer and all-round eater-and-drinker. In the opening scene, the great actress Fiona Shaw plays Grady's mother: before we know the relationships, we get a glimpse of her brushing crumbs off of Smith's dress jacket. That (and the spirited bathroom rumpy-pumpy that follows) made me eager for whatever followed.

Grant, who also wrote the Cinderella riff "Ever After," "In Her Shoes" and co-wrote 1995's "Pocahantas" and the 2006 "Charlotte's Web," does not disappoint: characters say smart things and do unkind things to one another, and the film does not judge them. There's an overall generosity that's very appealing, as well as a willingness not to indicate a verdict on the characters' different ways of dealing with grief as the plot unfolds. Not much time has passed, and Gray finds herself with one of her late fiancé's friends. Utterly plausible behavior, but uncommon in American movies. (France, perhaps.) The 44-year-old writer-director tells me she'd gotten a different reaction during editing and previews. "The one thing that's surprised me has been the judgment. There's been all kind of positive reactions, but then there's judgment of her behavior. How long ago was `The Big Chill'? Twenty years ago? Glenn Close had a full-on affair with the dead guy, and how difficult would it be to do that today? What does it say about our country that [the film gets] this reaction?"

She's grieving joyously, being human, life goes on, I suggest. "I wouldn't say she's grieving joyously, she's grieving, and..." Grant lets the pause linger. Grieving dot-dot-dot? She considers, "Grieving, and... People are complex."

The characters' back stories had always been simple, Grant says. The fact that Smith's character works for Celestial Seasonings isn't stressed until there's a nice payoff. "Honestly, who really cares what people do if it doesn't directly affect their role? It wasn't necessary, really. You find out when it's important to the people and hopefully they don't detract from the dynamic between the characters in the moment. I was interested in sneaking that stuff in when it's important. That was intentional. Part of my hope, a little bit of it, was an experiment in how little I could overtly say, both in terms of setup and in terms of emotional content. I have kind of a theory that when people are in their lives, in each other's lives, in a kind of full way, there's a tremendous amount that goes unsaid. Partly because it's understood and partly because you develop comfort patterns of avoidance, y'know? So that was interesting to me. That layer of the unsaid. There are a lot of times when people can ask a question or someone answers a question that's unasked."

But not baldly expositional. "Yeah. In the worst-case scenario, it would be oblique, and in the best-case scenario, [it's understood]. But in terms of how much story? There's a rule of thumb that a movie is a minute a page, but I've actually found in my work, every script that I've written, I'm about 1:15 a page. Emotional content takes time. In order to cut something so that it feels real and resonant, you build in pauses and you build in looks." And you trust actors who can do that. "Don't rush it," she told one actor. "There's plenty of stuff that happens between lines here. Use all of that."

The editor of "Catch and Release" is 81-year-old Anne V. Coates, who won an Oscar for cutting "Lawrence of Arabia." "One of the reasons I hired Anne is that she had cut `Erin Brockovich' and `Unfaithful,' which I'd had a little bit to do with at the end. I thought she was really good at cutting two levels of conversation. There's the conversation that happens verbally, and then there's a whole other conversation that happens, energy-wise, on looks. I wanted to be sure that that was there. Some people think action movies are the hardest to cut, but in fact, it's this [kind of movie]. If you cut to dialogue, you end up losing stuff. But if you cut to the performances and let the dialogue support that, you end up with a much more interesting scene. She was the only editor I talked to, who could bring the complexity to it that I wanted."

"Catch and Release" opens Friday.

(2007-01-23)

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