The problem I have with Return to Me is that I've seen it in a thousand other incarnations, and in this case, that might not be a hyperbolic statement. Destiny brings together Bob, a widowed contractor (Duchovny), and Grace, a delicate waitress (Minnie Driver), and their love is about overcoming a pink elephant in the room, here the fact that she was the recipient of his departed wife's heart. If you're groaning now, think back to some of the wedges that came between Cary Grant and his female co-stars.
The best love stories simply strain credulity, so the film's fatalistic premise brought a big dumb grin to my face. Unfortunately, no matter how loopy these things get, it's tough to reinvent the wheel, and it was with a sort of complacency that I travelled Return to Me's oft-charted romantic paths--I could've fast-forwarded to the inevitable climactic "I love you"s exchanged on foreign soil and had roughly the same moviegoing experience.
But then I would've missed out on the lot of charm that supports the two protags, chiefly Grace's Irish grandfather (Carroll O'Connor), who owns the restaurant where she works, and his poker buddies (Robert Loggia, Eddie Jones, and William Bronder). These veteran performers overcome their cloying placement in the action by innately out-classing the leads (although Duchovny is very likeable). Meanwhile, James Belushi offers his least contemptible work in years as an irrepressibly profane cop.
If her Letterman appearances are any indication, Hunt is a regular gal capable of wit both subtle and zinging. She and writing partner Don Lake carefully diffuse Hallmark moments with sharp humour--when Grace fakes her dying word, for instance, it's "rosebud." As a scenarist, Hunt needs to get past the Nora Ephron-isms, such as the pairing of Lubitsch-era sentiment with silky songs from the nineteen-fifties, to truly make a difference in the genre, though scattered endearing images, particularly those involving a gorilla, confirm that there is raw talent there.
MGM's DVD version of Return to Me is pretty good. The RSDL platter houses a 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer of the film that is often quite grainy (some of it unnatural in appearance; the opening credits look like analogue video) and hot, but colours are true and bright and compression artifacts are invisible. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, while generally subdued, kicks up a storm during a big band sequence in chapter four. Extras include: a largely uninformative screen-specific commentary by Hunt and Lake (recorded together) that for two people contains far too many gaps, as if they get caught up in what they're watching; a deleted scene in which O'Connor and the boys sing "Danny Boy"; the low-grade video for Joey Gian's "What If I Loved You"; and a book of coupons/contest entry forms.-Bill Chambers
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