'Return': Too Good to Be True By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 7, 2000

The truth is out there: David Duchovny and Minnie Driver succumb to lame writing. (MGM)

What's not to like?

Well, nothing, except for the movie.

I hate its central idea, from which radiates all matter of grotesqueness. It's that God somehow keeps track of the good people on Earth and pulls strings, unleashes cosmic puffs of wind or engineers the proper intercession of nuns at key plot moments to make them happy. It even begins with God's view of Bob Rueland (David Duchovny) from Heaven, as the Grand Gentleman cranks up His zoom lens so that it penetrates the clouds over Chicago, examines the rooftops and finally finds His special boy. I would hope that the Big Fella is turning his mercy on other problem zones--say, Bosnia, Chechnya, Colombia or wherever--than David Duchovny's heart.

The movie is a tale of the heart--literally. It begins with an elaborate scheme of cross-cutting. It documents the perfect lives of Bob and his wife, Elizabeth (Joely Richardson), celebrating the icky gooey wonderfulness of their life. He: prosperous Chicago builder, handsome, slim, charming. She: director of primatology at the Lincoln Park Zoo, handsome, slim, charming. They're flawlessly on the side of angels, flawlessly good-hearted. Even Sydney, the great ape, loves them, and Bob is building a new habitat so that the 800-pound gorilla can sit anywhere he wants.

On the other side of the movie, director Bonnie Hunt tracks the unhappy fate of poor Grace Briggs (Minnie Driver), who is dying at 25 of congenital heart failure. Sustained by oxygen tubes and plasma bags, she looks a little like E.T. wasting away in a Spielberg yarn. Darn it, she's just too good to die. But if she doesn't get a heart . . .

Hunt has no interest in showing the reality of the inevitable auto accident, whose nasty physics would disrupt her treacly vision of life. Instead, she cuts immediately to the emergency ward where Bob, tastefully dabbed with blood, is yowling in agony next to the gurney on which his wife's still form lies encased in linen. We know that she's one dead potato, but since the blood smear on the bandage indicates she got whacked with a head injury, not a thoracic intrusion, we also know her pumper is intact. Just as we know the phone will ring at Grace's with the notification that her new heart is on ice, like a freshly snagged carp.

ONE YEAR LATER, says a title card, helpfully.

Now Bob is living fully the root of his name--Rue, as in sadness: blubbery, bitter, self-pitying. Plus, he never throws out his half-empty food cartons, so the inside of his fashionable Near North town house looks like the storage room at a Chinese restaurant.

Meanwhile, Grace is also living the meaning of her name: She's hale, merry, full of her own grace, kind, decent, a force for good in the world, one of those beings who have the gift of life. (Her garden is like the original, in Eden. Only it's on the roof.)

Does anyone doubt that the screenplay will wretchedly contrive to connect these two good people and that infatuation will blossom, growing swiftly to full, slobbery necking? (No sex, please. We're hanging on to that PG as if it were a lifeline to a really smart person.)

One question: If what's going to happen is so obvious, why does it take Hunt so long to get it to us?

But she's too busy indulging herself with adorability: Grace lives with an adorable extended family, including adorably crusty septuagenarians Carroll O'Connor (good, as always) and Robert Loggia (Robert Loggia, as always), plus her sister (Hunt herself) and the sister's horny but adorable husband (Jim Belushi; say, anybody remember when he was a star?). They have adorable kids, though too many of them. Bob's co-workers? Adorable. The city of Chicago? Way adorable. Oh come let us adore this movie!

Only one last question remains, though it sustains (wanly) the entire second half of the film. That is: What will Bob do when he learns that Grace lives only because Helen has died and that that's Helen's ticker ticktocking away in Grace's chest cavity? Alas, what Duchovny does is truly terrible: He tries to act.

Though the movie stumbles after spontaneity and a kind of exaggerated reality, it feels so stage-managed, so plotted and surprise-free it doesn't liberate your spirit, it deadens it. The earnest and "subtle" religiosity of it is made worse by the suspicion that all and sundry associated with it self-consciously thought they were doing a "good thing," as opposed to the usual product from the devil town, Hollywood.

But "Return to Me" is so phony it makes your gums ache. It's like having your head clamped in a vise and being force-fed sugar cubes by an ex-Up-With-People member who now owns an Amway franchise and knows what's best, dammit!

RETURN TO ME (PG, 116 minutes) – Contains stunningly brain-dead writing and unnecessarily gruesome material, all of this completely inappropriate for children and, come to think of it, adults.