"Catch and Release" misses the hook

By Sarah Marie Pittman
The Collegian

Although I own the bubble-gum scented DVD of “13 Going on 30” and cry every time Billy Crystal proclaims his love to Meg Ryan in “How Harry Met Sally,” as someone who is newly engaged, I wasn’t totally sold on a movie that begins with the sudden death of a girl’s fiancé and centers around her falling in love with her fiancé’s best friend.

“Catch and Release” still looked pretty cute, so I decided to give it a try. I should have listened to my woman’s intuition. It was worse than expected, and trust me, a chick-flick has to be pretty bad for me not to like it.

Gray Wheeler’s (Jennifer Garner’s) fiancé has just died and since she doesn’t have enough money to pay rent on her own, she is forced to move into the house her fiancé used to share with his two buddies, Dennis (Sam Jaeger) and Sam (Kevin Smith).

This is where the implausibility begins. Doesn’t she have any friends who are girls and not best buds with her dead fiancé? And who would want to sleep in their dead fiancé’s bed? Creepy.

The weirdness continues when Gray’s fiancé’s childhood friend, Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), who came to town for the funeral, decides to crash at the house for a couple of days.

The first time we meet Fritz is at the funeral. Gray is crying in a bathtub, unbeknownst to Fritz, when he coincidentally enters that same bathroom and proceeds to have sex with a pigtailed caterer.

In accordance with one of the crazy rules of chick flicks, Gray must now fall for the guy who is completely wrong for her. For some reason the writer-director (Academy Award nominee Susannah Grant) decides to make their first kiss tender with cheesy music instead of what it is — awkward and strange.

When a girl finally falls for the bad boy there is supposed to have been some character development, some situation where he redeem himself and proved that under that leather jacket he really has a heart of gold. The only thing that Fritz does is say that his favorite color is “gray.” Cute.

Before the viewers can find out if Gray and Fritz really are soul mates, there are crazy plot twists which include a new-age masseuse, lots of money, a kid, a love confession, a hospital visit and a crazy ex-mother-in-law. Most of these surprises stem from secrets Gray learns about her deceased fiancé.

As I mentioned before, this movie is incredibly unbelievable. Not in the sense of “girl meets a dreamboat on a hot air balloon trip to Paris,” but unbelievable in the sense that “It’s wrong to fall in love with your dead fiancé’s best friend a week after he died.”

Though Jennifer Garner delivers an adequate performance, with a plot this ridiculous, nobody could create chemistry between the romantic leads.

Kevin Smith is there to provide the laughs, while the other roommate is just there to be boring. My favorite part of the movie is that Smith works for Celestial Seasonings, an herbal tea company known for printing philosophical quotes on their tea bags, quotes he is more than happy to claim as his own.

By the end of the movie, we are supposed to have learned more about Gray through the death of her fiancé, but we instead find ourselves more confused about her character than when the movie began.

Martin Luther said on the back of a peppermint tea bag, “Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.” Have faith that you are better off not “catching” this movie during what will, no doubt, be a very limited “release.”

Comment on this story in the Features forum >>