It never fails. The conversation is always the same. Some girl says that they like a Cinderella Story or the Perfect Man or Failure to Launch and I need to be the bearer of bad news: none of these movies are any good. And the reaction is always the same: well, you’re a guy. Yes, I am, and a Cinderella Story is a bad movie. I could be a chimpanzee and it would still be terrible. Gender has nothing to do with the argument. All movies have the possibility of being great and all movies have the possibility of being terrible. All the ones I just named are terrible. Here is a great one.

Catch and Release doesn’t exactly tread new territory but it treads old territory with so much understanding and observation that it barely registers. On the surface it is a romance, underneath it is both a tragedy and a comedy, in roughly that order, and because it is both in such equal proportion, it is also neither.

The film is about a girl named Gray who, as played by Jennifer Garner, possesses much of the same flair and dramatic depth of Julie Roberts. Gray is to be married but after her fiancée Grady is killed while on a fishing trip before the wedding, Gray finds herself planning a funeral instead.

She stays with two of Grady’s kooky best friends, and one, a bad boy from L.A. who remains with them after coming for the funeral. Thus Gray, through the help of the roommates, must learn to come to grips with what has happened and get her life back on track. But there’s more. After her fiancée’s phone beginnings ringing one night, Gray learns that he was paying a woman child support to help out with a son she never knew he had. Fritz (Timothy Olyphant) assures her that the kid is eight years old and happened long before her. When the mother (Juliette Lewis) finally enters the picture it turns out that the kid is closer to four and happened during her.

What I’ve just described sounds like pretty standard fare. It wouldn’t help if I also included the fact that soon after, Gray and Fritz slowly work their way into a relationship with each other. But the film is so comfortable in its own skin under the care of writer/director Susannah Grant that we never once feel as though the plot is grinding its gears.

This is in part because of the way in which Grant handles her narrative. Most romances set up a scenario which is then proceed by action: guy gets girl, guy loses girl, girl realizes….etc. Catch and Release however is built upon a foundation of cause and effect. It pauses to breathe, showing us life’s deterministic nature: all action is the stimulus for an equal reaction. The film is not about big emotional actions like most Hollywood romances, but a chain of small reactions which stem from an original catalyst. Thus, Grady’s death functions not as gimmick but rather a starting point from which to build. The relationship between Gray and Fritz blossoms not through convenience, but a natural ordering of events, and, most importantly, even when the possibility arises, none of the characters are played as caricature; they constantly exist on our level.

This being the case, both comedy and tragedy occur without build-up or payoff as events simply unfold; we watch how characters relate to them and then they disappear. This is something that is so rarely see, that many critics have unfairly confused it with sloppiness. However this is not the case as we realize that some films merely leave you with the sense that their characters only exist within the frame. Here Grant and her actors create what Cameron Crowe’s best work has achieved; a sense of comfort and friendship, of relating to characters because they mirror our best qualities. Take this perfectly written dialogue which effortlessly juggles sarcasm with pathos: 

Fritz: I owe you an apology.
Gray: Just one?
Fritz: For the funeral.
Gray: Yeah, if it hadn't been for you, that would've been one great day.