Catch and
   Release C + Cast:
   
Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, Kevin Smith, Sam Jaeger

Director: Susannah
Grant

Rating: PG-13
for sexual content, language, drug use

Running time:
124 minutes A strange fish of a film, Susannah Grant's directorial debut Catch and Release glitters and reeks. Or, to stretch the eightpound analogy to the breaking point, we could say it's handsomely mounted but cheaply obtained -- a trophy trout brought home from the supermarket.
   You could spend a lot of time dissecting what went wrong here -- and it's not a disaster, just another rom-com disappointment -- but the chief problem is one of tone. Catch and Release means to suggest a certain sexual edginess, to impel us to grab love when and where we can find it -- never mind the social embarrassment that might attend the pursuit of happiness. But it plays like a male wish-fulfillment fantasy: "I love you, man, but if you die, can I have your hot girlfriend?"
   Or rather, can I have Jennifer Garner as Gray Wheeler, moused-up in an outdoorsy Boulder, Colo., slacker-girl kind of way. When her beloved Grady dies in a fishing accident on the eve of their wedding, she finds herself surrounded by his coterie of slacker buds: smart, sensitive and obese Sammy (Kevin Smith), reliable business partner Dennis (Sam Jaeger) and smarmy Malibu filmmaker Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), who is so broken up by his best friend's passing he hooks up with a caterer at Grady's funeral. (Boys will be cads, you know.)
   While Gray has never much cared for Fritz -- you know what that means -- she has practically been one of the boys, and finds herself living with Sammy and Dennis in a claustrophobic bungalow; she can't afford the house she was going to rent with her fiance because he's dead and she's broke. (He wasn't, not by a long shot, but none of them knew this. Not even his well-off mother. But since they weren't married, Gray gets zero and is even asked to return her engagement ring.)
   This cozy arrangement might be plausible were these people post-collegiate twentysomethings, but considering most of them are pushing 40, it's just sad.
   Dennis pines for Gray in classic stoic John Alden/Ronald Reagan fashion. But by the time he announces himself, Gray is already sleeping with Fritz. In order to soothe his feelings, Gray tells Dennis her affair is "nothing... less than nothing!"
   That's supposed to make Dennis feel better? Not to mention how it makes Fritz feel. And we're supposed to empathize with poor, bereaved Gray?
   Grant's script connects some more dots when it introduces Juliette Lewis as a none-toobright New Age massage therapist to whom Grady had been paying child support. It's not so much a vicious caricature as a clumsy one, but had the part been written by a man it might reasonably be called a misogynistic portrayal. Although Lewis' character turns out to be a fine person, the character is treated with unseemly condescension.
   Smith is a bright spot; his Sammy is bright and funny and pathetic, a thwarted guy who seems to be the only one who genuinely grieves for Grady. And maybe it's unfair to say that Sammy's lines sound like they were written by Kevin Smith, but that's what they sound like.
   And Olyphant, playing a faux bad boy with a heart as big as all outdoors, has an intense, locked-in gaze that, like Jack Nicholson, suggests a potential for violence. Fritz is pretty much a lean, muscled Hollywood trope; Olyphant's edge of ferocity, so effective in his role as lawman Seth Bullock in the HBO series Deadwood, is of little use here.

This story was published Friday, January 26, 2007