It's a movie about love and trust. It's a movie about marriage and divorce. It's a movie about how all these things can mess you up beyond belief and change your life forever.

And it's a direct descendent of the great screwball comedies like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby. George Clooney as Miles Massey does a pretty good Cary Grant (without the accent, of course), while Catherine Zeta-Jones' Marilyn seems to be channeling Susan Hayward. They make the movie, and while they don't exactly have chemistry, they have a camaraderie and a conspiratorial jolliness that more than makes up for it. Other screwballs include Geoffrey Rush as a cuckolded television producer, Cedric the Entertainer as a private investigator, and Billy Bob Thornton as Catherine Z-J's future ex-husband. The nicest surprise was seeing Julia Duffy, the maid from Newhart, as Catherine Z-J's friend and inspiration. The most disconcerting thing in the film was Edward Herrmann, Lorelai Gilmore's dad, as a...well...as a train fetishist, I guess is the only way to explain it.

Still...with all that it has going for it (great cast, great writing, clever idea), somehow it just falls flat. It's not really a romantic comedy so much as it is a spoof of romantic comedies. At times it's a pastiche of lawyer jokes and LA jokes (the iron-clad Massey pre-nup, Miles' fascination with his whitened teeth). There's also a lot of repetition of these gags, which, while funny the first time, lose their freshness rather quickly.

It's not a bad little movie...it just wasn't as good as I was expecting or as I was hoping. But then...isn't that also kind of the reasoning behind a divorce?