Catch and Release (updated)

This movie was surprisingly good. I thought it would be light and sweet--a good movie for a Saturday afternoon. It was much deeper and richer than I expected. The premise of the film is that a young woman's fiance has died just before their wedding, and the story follows her journey as she and his best friends gently put together the pieces of what they knew about him.

The characterizations are subtle and complex--you haven't seen these people before in every other romantic comedy. And it offers a meditation on what we know about each other and why we choose to keep secrets large and small. The movie also hits what seemed to me to be a perfect emotional pitch--it's actually quite funny, but not without pain. The bittersweetness and the humor reside easily together in a poignancy rather than a discomfort. Well, I guess that's about all I can say without being even more annoyingly evasive--I want you to see it for yourselves and have the whole experience in the theater, rather than while reading this blog.

UPDATE: π writes that I'm bucking the trend with this review and sends me the link to Rotten Tomatoes to prove it. Reading their excerpts makes me realize: I liked it because it turned out not to be a romantic comedy at all . . . it's really a story about loss, gently rendered.