Return To Me
(Click here for Internet Movie Database entry)

This is the kind of movie that I almost never go to see. You can tell the whole story from the trailer and you know there won't be any interesting surprises or even two dimensional characters. But the trailer for Return to Me was so appealing and featured actors that I like.  So I couldn't resist and I went to see it. The story is about a guy (David Duchovny) who has a perfect marriage to a perfect wife except that she is killed in a car accident and her heart is given to a transplant patient (Minnie Driver). This being Hollywood, Duchovny and Driver soon meet and fall in love not knowing their connection. Driver works at an Irish-Italian restaurant run by her Irish grandfather (Carrol O'Connor) and an Italian chef (Robert Loggia). These guys and their pals overact with reckless abandon. They are very entertaining. The film was written and directed by Bonnie Hunt who also plays Driver's best friend. She is a great comic actress most famous for the "We're walking, we're walking, we're stopping" scene in Dave. As I suspected from seeing the trailer, this movie has no surprises, no plot twists, no dark side, no character development. But it is a heart warming film which sucks you in despite the fact that you know exactly how it is going to play out. David Duchovny, famed the world over for his role as Mulder in The X-Files, actually smiles repeatedly in this movie and does a very good job. He and Minnie Driver have a good chemistry as does the whole cast. Besides the old guys, there are some very funny scenes between Hunt and her husband played by Jim Belushi. Given that this movie was never going to be complex, it still takes too long to work itself up to the climatic scene where all is finally revealed, and even then it is just a little bump on the road to true love. Hunt does a good job of making the movie funny without being too sweet.  So if you just saw High Fidelity and you are tired of thinking too much and want romance without all those messy details, this is the movie for you.