Throw it back

>> Awkward and underwritten
dramedy Catch and Release flops

SKIMPY CHARACTERS: Sam Jaeger, Kevin Smith and Jennifer Garner

It’s not always easy to blend humour and pathos into that elusive genre we call “dramedy,” as Catch and Release proves. The directorial debut for screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich, Charlotte ’s Web), this weird, wobbly flick wants to have it all: big laughs, big tears, big hugs. But it’s so awkward, so underwritten and so haphazardly directed, so full of some truly bizarre product placement, that it’s hard to take seriously—or hilariously, for that matter.
 

Jennifer Garner plays Gray Wheeler (which sounds like the name for some sort of seniors’ car club), a young widow living in Boulder , Colorado . Wait—make that almost-widow, as she was just about to marry her fiancé when he died in some sort of boating accident. She’s soon hanging out, mourning and fishing with his friends: saucy L.A. dude Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), her husband’s business partner Dennis (Sam Jaeger, looking like some weird mutant Aaron Eckhart), and friendly dude Sam, played by Kevin Smith.
 

Yes, that Kevin Smith, playing the light comic relief best-buddy role, and plastered with ads—t-shirts, mugs etc—for... are you ready for this? Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea. There’s no other product placement in the movie, but there is a lot of play given to this tea company, where Smith’s character works finding inspirational quotes to put on their boxes.
 

Garner and Olyphant eventually, against their instincts, begin to fall for each other, especially after she learns that her ex-hubby-to-be had secretly fathered a child with new agey massage therapist Juliette Lewis.  But he’s not the only character with a mysterious past: for a movie where everyone basically stands around gabbing about each others’ lives for two hours, the characterizations are seriously skimpy.
 

For most of the movie, I half-thought that Jaeger and Smith’s characters were meant to be gay lovers, and all we even really know about Garner is that she works in some sort of office (possibly also at Celestial Seasonings, considering the amount of branded junk we see on her desk). We don’t learn much more about anybody else, and it’s almost impossible to get emotionally involved with characters who aren’t much more than joke-cracking, huggable ciphers. With nothing to connect with, laugh at or enjoy, Catch and Release is definitely worth throwing back.

Catch and Release opens this

Friday, Jan. 26