Director: Bonnie Hunt
Starring: David Duchovny, Minnie Driver, David Alan Grier, Bonnie Hunt, James Belushi, Carroll O'Connor, Robert Loggia, Joely Richardson

- Reviewed by Linda

The setup of this film on paper just oozes with Hollywood cheese: a man's beloved, beautiful, brilliant wife dies in a car accident and her heart is donated for a heart transplant. Time goes by... the man, now a widower of a year, meets sweet with a young waitress who has some self-confidence problems, i.e. what is that big ol' scar down her chest? Turns out (gasp!) that she was the recipient of his late-wife's heart, so of course they were made for each other. <Music swells, audiences wipes away happy tears, house lights go up...>

But you know, I liked this movie. It could easily (oh, so easily) have slipped into retch-inducing, sugar-coated Hollywood-o-rama blandness that we have come to expect these days. But filmmaker Bonnie Hunt smartly cast a bunch of actors that play very well off each other, who just seem to be having a lot of fun. David Duchovny, as Bob the widower, drops his cardboard Mulder persona and is surprisingly charming. It sure doesn't hurt that Bob works in construction, so he gets to wear Levis through most of the movie... Oh! Anyways... Minnie Driver, as the heart-girl, is perfectly fine (I usually don't have much of a response to Minnie, but she didn't bug me in this movie). Bonnie Hunt (work it, Bonnie!) does double-duty, and acts in her movie as well, pretty much reprising her Jerry Maguire role as best-friend/sisterly-older-confidant to her romantically confused younger counterpart, offering Minnie a shoulder to lean on. Hunt and James Belushi (who is a hoot!), as her husband, get all the hilarious scenes, as they play their lines straight while their countless children crawl all over them like vermin.

The background is peppered with several colorful characters who all make an impression: David Alan Grier as Bob's best friend, Robert Loggia and Carroll O'Connor who run an Irish/Italian bar (wacky!) and are overly protective of their granddaughter, and even Bob's dog, who plays a big part in Bob's mourning for his dead wife.

Return to Me offers a nice dose of old-style Hollywood: an old-fashioned romance with no gratuitous sex or violence of any sort, with its only cursing as comic relief. You sure don't get many movies like that these days!

* Disclaimer: Despite the fact that I won a bicycle (fer cryin' out loud!) at the preview screening for this film, I DID NOT receive payment of any kind to write a good review of this film!  - Linda

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