RATING:

Starring Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, Mike Binder, Tom Harper, Dane Christensen, Danny Webb, Magdalena Manville, Suzanne Bertish, David Firth, Rod Woodruff, Stephen Greif. Written and Directed by Mike Binder.

Rated R for language, sexual situations, brief comic violence and some drug use.

Wait, come back! When you heard that this was a romantic comedy with Kevin Costner you fled, you hid, you ran from every gooey cliché. So did I. Somehow, though, defying all conventional wisdom, this romance is shockingly great, effortlessly flitting between comedy and drama.

Joan Allen stars as Terry, an upper-middle-class housewife who has every reason to be angry. Her husband just ditched her for his Swedish secretary and then galloped off to Sweden, not even giving a word of explanation. Jane’s devastated, pissed, and left alone to raise her four teenage daughters, who, in the cruelest irony, seem to hold her responsible for their father’s departure.

Every morning Jane romps through the house in her bathrobe, vodka tonic in hand, too distraught to even fake it for her daughters. Director Mike Binder wisely plays these scenes for laughs, not sentimentality, focusing on the daughters’ bewildered reactions.

For instance, when the girls are making dinner—and listening to their mother’s cantankerous drama in the next room—their pet dog licks the plate of chicken. After one of the girls eats the chicken anyways, she says, “It was only two seconds!” Another shoots back, “The two second rule applies for when food falls on the ground, not when it’s licked by a tongue that was just licking other dogs’ assholes.”

Jane is interrupted from her angry haze by her husband’s drinking buddy, ex-baseball star Denny Davies (Costner). Denny, with a receding hairline and a small gut, swigs cans of Budweiser at ten in the morning, waving from her front lawn. He asks to come in. She says no. He promises not to talk, just drink. She relents. After the obligatory first-act-of-romantic-comedy-standoffish-sexual-tension, the two settle into a comfortable routine, and Denny becomes a regular house-guest, bonding with Jane and the girls.

Denny’s dim-witted, likable jockiness is superb counterbalance to Jane’s weighty grief. They have real chemistry. And he’s funny—thanks, in large part, to Costner’s willingness to mock his athlete-stock character. After Jane withdraws an offer for casual sex, she says that he missed his window, and that the offer only comes around once every 57 years, like Haley’s comet. Denny says, “What the hell is Haley’s comet?”

The humor disarms us, charms us, seduces us into liking the characters. When the tone gets darker in the film’s third act, it hits us that much harder. The comedy sets up the drama, or, as Denny might thing of it, like how a football team uses a smash-mouth running game to establish the passing attack.

In a similar structure to “Parenthood,” each of the four daughters— Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Evan Rachel Wood, Erika Chirstensen—gets her own storyline. Each story works. We’re given just enough unique, compelling details to feel empathy for each girl. An interpretive dancer (Russell), who seems calm on the outside, suffers from an ulcer as she literally swallows her anger and anxiety. The oldest girl gets pregnant and married, setting up the film’s comic highlight, where Jane gives the worst wedding toast since Vince Vaughn’s from “Old School.” The youngest, most sensitive girl tries to seduce an even shyer boy, who’s really into bungee-jumping and might or might not be gay. And the fourth daughter has a gross, somewhat upsetting affair with a sleazy 40-something, Shep.

Ah, Shep. Just a bit character, Shep encapsulates why this movie works. Played by director Mike Binder, Shep, who has the facial hair of a 70’s porn-star, is nominally disgusting, perverted, and weasely. But as we see toward the end of the film, even Shep isn’t just a one-note caricature; even Shep has some nuance, some complexity. When he gives his little “speech” about why he doesn’t sleep with women his age, we squirm, we want to slap him, but, however repulsive, we can sort of understand where he’s coming from.

Like Shep, every character is humanized, seen from multiple angles. Especially, of course, Joan Allen’s jilted housewife. Allen’s anger is wonderfully destructive, lashing out at her daughters and Denny and at herself, blinding her to the affection of everyone around her. Yet through the outbursts we see the grief; through her drinking we see jealousy and regret, the sense of failure and loss.

In the end, Binder gives in to the temptation of certain Hollywood clichés, such as beginning with a flash-forward and then a “Three Years Earlier . . ” (Really. This gratuitous, gimmicky structure needs to stop. Showing a glimpse of the future is a flimsy hook, a cheap way to grab attention.) The courtship between Costner and Allen is a little too precious. And a voice-over that articulates the film’s themes, already expressed through drama, robs the movie of its subtlety. Oh, and the drinking? We get it. A symbol, thanks.

Still, it works. The tension between Costner and Allen, between bitter comedy and tender grief, is enough to earn our interest and our pathos. The biggest surprise is that the release date is March, not December, where it might have garnered some Oscar buzz for Allen and perhaps even Binder.

Agree? Disagree? E-mail me at jeff@latinoreview.com.