The Movie...Catch and Release

I watched one of my favourite movies yesterday, a romantic comedy called Catch and Release, and as always it left me feeling melancholy.

Here's the link to the movie trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NuyXTNQsJY

I love the scenery in this movie, the small town in Colorado at the base of the mountains. If I traveled, this place would be on my bucket list.

In the opening scene, Gray, played by Jennifer Garner, is at the funeral of her fiancé, after his untimely death during his bachelor party weekend. So, instead of getting married, she’s thrown into no man’s land, neither a widow nor a wife.

Gray moves into the house her fiancé shared with his two friends, all of them struggling to deal with their loss. Complicating matters is Fritz, played by Timothy Olyphant. He was a childhood friend of the dead man, who had moved to LA and found success. The two men had stayed close, often meeting on the west coast when the fiancé traveled for business.

The plot thickens, as all plots do, when Gray discovers her fiancé had a great deal of money in the bank, and was paying out a substantial amount of that money every month. No one knew where this money was going, until Gray finds that a woman in LA is frantically trying to get hold of her fiancé.

The ‘other’ woman arrives in Colorado, looking for the money that has been supporting her and her son for the last few years. Gray is devastated to learn her fiancé had fathered a child, during the time they were a couple, and kept it a secret.

This is one of those movies where the lead character has to rebuild her life. During the process she discovers who she really is, a plot that seems to appeal to me. The romantic interest is between Gray and Fritz, an unlikely pairing as she found him too cavalier, compared to her more uptight and less adventurous persona.

But the pain, for Gray, is more than the infidelity and the resulting child. It’s learning that her fiancé felt he had to leave her to be the fun loving guy he seemed to be when he was on the coast, when he visited Fritz. She starts to act out, and Fritz is there to help her find her more easy going nature.

All their relationships change during this time, the friend who had secretly been in love with Gray, the other friend who never took anything seriously, and Gray and Fritz.

Of course it has a happy ending, so no spoiler alert kind of warning is needed. Gray takes a chance and travels to the coast looking for Fritz. She finds him on the beach in front of his ocean side home, and suffers a moment of insecurity, questioning her actions.

I love the last line, when Fritz smiles at her and says. “What took you so long?”

I seem to be drawn to books and movies where people find this deeper understanding of themselves, and have the courage to change, to go after their dreams. I like to think it’s because I’m a romantic, but I fear it’s more of a sense of longing. I regret that I never took that chance and now find some comfort in stories where others took that risk and were rewarded with their “happy ever after”.