Ill-advised Holly Hunter completism. She has a minor role as some kind of lawyer representing parents Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon in the trial of their daughter's murderer. Jake Gyllenhaal was due to (spoiler not) marry her around the time when it happened.
I think it's supposed to be a grief comedy, but the sentiments expressed were so alien to me, the situations and humour so predictable, forced and tedious that I stopped paying attention early on. Commercial real estate agent Hoffman is quite restrained except for once or twice when he reaches for Al Pacino. Death penalty please! — with a nose wrinkle when he's told it'll be by gas. We get the full range of book-burning writer Susan Sarandon facial expressions: calculating squint, bugeyes!, pensive, I-know-rite, I'll-let-you-in-on-a-secret, cigarette fug/bliss and so on and on. Death for her too. She says she wants Gyllenhaal to remain celibate for the rest of his days and other things which I took to be Oedipal, but of course he goes for the age-appropriate barwench/post office worker/fellow griever Ellen Pompeo and they eventually drive off into the sunset. (We're told she was into her long-absent boyfriend because he loved her, and knew her "about 60%". He claims it's the last 40% that matters, which sums up the empty headed linearity of the whole thing.) There's a Rolling Stones-adjacent soundtrack. I don't know when this was set but the feeling is some time during the America-Việt Nam War, late 1960s maybe.
Roger Ebert: four stars. He says 1973, and as he was there he might know. Stephanie Zacharek somehow thinks this is culturally universal. Gag me with a spoon. A. O. Scott. Everyone says: The Graduate. Brad Silberling wrote and directed.