The movie brings together two lonely, isolated people: Sharon (Jennifer Lopez), a prickly, no-nonsense cop who handles emotion the way she handles bad guys -- with suspicion and a heavy touch; and Catch (Jim Caviezel), a stray dog of a man drifting through the streets with a haunted look in his eyes (both actors, by the way, are excellent). Catch is sort of Sharon's mirror image, but more dramatic and more concrete in his losses, like the embodiment of her angst. Sharon's estrangement from her family is emotional; Catch's is physical: his wife and child were killed in a car accident. Though Catch is more often physically alone, both are equally cut off from human contact; Sharon banters with the other police officers but never gets personal. She rarely dates because even asking the simplest questions about her date's life and work comes out like an interrogation. So when Catch saves Sharon's life and she finds herself in a quiet moment with him, she pours out her fears to him almost involuntarily, not because they have some mystical connection, but precisely because she doesn't think she'll ever see him again.
Of course, they do see each other again and begin an uneasy relationship that reminded me of Janeane Garofalo's routine about her fears of intimacy, where she talks about making out with her boyfriend in her truck instead of going into her apartment because that would just be "too weird," and how Hallmark should make a card that says, "Things are going so well between us... that I'm going to have to find more ways to make myself emotionally unavailable to you." They both ache to connect, to fill in the empty spaces they see in each other, but they both pull back from the brink a couple of times.
The stories of how Catch and Sharon separately sift out the good moments in their painful pasts to make peace with their own demons are done nicely in parallel; unfortunately, Catch's side of it is mawkish and facile, a lot like how Matt Damon was suddenly all better from having Robin Williams shout at him, "It's not your fault! It's not your fault!" in Good Will Hunting. More satisfying and realistic is Sharon's denouement -- guess what? You can tell someone how you're really feeling, you can try to explain things rationally, you can even try to meet the other person more than halfway -- and you still might not end up one step beyond where you started. In fact, it might not even make you feel all that much better for having tried. And Sharon slams painfully into that truth.
The film feels sloppy and hastily patched together. Catch has a quirky habit of not closing doors behind him that seems like it should mean something, but he abruptly stops doing it with no explanation. A giant bruise on Sharon's chest from a bullet hitting her bulletproof vest appears and disappears in the same scene. The accident that kicks off the story is shown alternately in daylight and at night, in sunshine and in pouring rain. The same slapdash work ethic takes over the ending, when the movie, which had been a reasonably in-depth, complex drama about emotion, abruptly winds up with a cheery, "everybody's fine" giggle.
I liked this movie, but of course, I have "issues." Healthy, well-adjusted people may not feel the same connection as I -- or the same desire to see other people wrestle with emotional closure. But how many of you are healthy and well-adjusted, really? (And for those few of you who are, James Caviezel and Jennifer Lopez are nice to look at, okay?)
(Can I just say one thing that I really appreciated about this movie? There's no stupid subplot about drug shipments or bad cops or some other crap designed to shoehorn action into an emotional drama. It's awfully rare these days to find a movie that's confident enough to focus on the relations between two people without piling on useless distractions.)
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