To some extent, Catch and Release is able to do the latter. The layout of the story doesn’t start out as too hard to believe, although it is a little depressing. Gray (Jennifer Garner) begins the movie as a broken almost-widow, dressed in black after the death of her fiance Grady (who'd have thought a couple made up of Gray and Grady wouldn't last?), who passed in some unexplained boating accident on his bachelor trip just days before the wedding. This is played up to full traumatic effect- with Gray’s nuptial hall redesigned as a memorial service, she has to spend the first scenes of the movie watching her wedding flowers be turned away at the door. Ouch.

Painful as this set-up may be, it doesn’t seem entirely implausible. It’s only when Gray, faced with some unexpected rent problems after her fiancé’s demise, moves in with his old roommates and buddies (Kevin Smith and Sam Jaeger), that the movie begins to take some liberties with its audience’s capacity for suspending reality. And when Gray begins to fall for Grady’s straight-from-L.A.-so-he-must-have-no-morals best friend Fritz (Timothy Olyphant, of Deadwood fame,) who also, for some reason, is deciding to crash at his dead best friend’s pad- well that’s just plain stretching it.

Although the movie tries its hardest to make this love connection feel sweet and only kind of painful, it’s hard to get over the fact that it’s just a little…disturbing. The movie isn’t clear on the passage of time, but it seems as if only a few weeks- possibly a month or so- goes by after Grady’s death before his fiancé and best friend in the world are getting it on, all secret-style. The romance tries to seem more credible after Gray learns certain unwholesome truths from Grady’s past, involving a ditzy new-age blonde (Juliette Lewis) and her four-year-old son. Instead of enhancing the weirdness of an already strange romance, these plot twists just drive Gray and Fritz closer together.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to buy. But Catch and Release does make a sporting effort to make up for this doomed-to-fail romance (even after the final reconciliation scene I was giving the couple six months tops to last). The sexual chemistry between Garner and Olyphant is palpable, which makes up for the fact that they seem like two characters with very little to actually say to each other. And the comic relief in Catch and Release is measurable as well- in large part to Smith and Lewis, who don’t seem to take great pains to act like anything other than their already well-known and funny personas. Smith’s bumbling chubster routine and Lewis’ airhead act are two of the highlights of the movie- proving that sometimes the most out-there characters can provide the most real emotion.

And this is a movie that needs to hold onto all the ‘real’ it can get. It’s not the fault of the actors (although Olyphant’s whole routine seems like a running cliché and Garner’s performance is about as interesting as a graham cracker)- the problem lies in the premise of the movie. The heroine is an emotionally distraught mess and the hero, although he gamely tries to cover it by sleeping with a caterer at the memorial service and acting like an all-over jackass, is clearly upset by his best friend’s death as well. Are these two people, with nothing in common besides their grief, really expected to sustain a relationship beyond the closing scene? I’d sooner believe in a bus jumping over a 50-foot gap on an L.A. freeway.

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