Misplaced trust

I find it interesting how you can have all of the elements of a fun romantic comedy at your disposal - good concept, great cast, a reasonably light touch - but it doesn't quite get there.

Take Trust the Man, which I watched last night on DVD. It has a fantastic cast; David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Billy Crudup, and the gorgeous Julianne Moore. They have great chemistry with one another. I believed in the friendship between Rebecca (Moore) and Elaine (Gyllenhaal), and Duchovny and Moore make a great screen couple. As a quartet, they worked well together.

It's a good set-up for a romantic comedy too. One couple's marriage has lost its zing, and the other has commitment issues. And New York looks fantastic, as it always does in these Manhattan-based rom-coms, with affluent, arty protagonists. I particularly liked the snow.

Despite its many good elements, Trust the Man didn't quite get there for me. It's got me wondering why, because I'm not that hard to please when it comes to a rom-com.

Most romantic comedies follow a well worn path. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. It's a fantasy formula used over and over again, and with good reason. The pay-off is readily attained if you get the elements right.

But it can be fun when it's mixed up a bit. In this case the romance was more rooted in reality, the boys already had the girls, and the story was really about how they were losing one another. It worked for me until the climax, which felt wrong somehow; it was literally too stagey. It didn't ring true for me, maybe because it wasn't quite fantasy and it certainly wasn't reality.

It's still worth seeing, and a nice way to spend a quiet Sunday night on the couch out of ratings season. But I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to beat a path to the video store to get hold of it.