Catch and Release (2006)

Catch and Release arrived in 2006 as the directorial debut of Susannah Grant, a screenwriter of some standing, and it concerns Gray Wheeler, a woman who loses her fiancé on the day they were to be married and then discovers, at leisure, that he was a liar with a million dollars, a second household, and a child who turns out to belong to somebody else entirely. Boulder, Colorado stands in for itself. Kevin Smith supplies the comic relief and, by most accounts, the best performance in the thing. The film bombed, which reads less like an injustice than a shrug.

The social inventory here is thin and mostly accidental. A woman wrote and directed it, which in 2006 counted for something, and Gray refuses her late fiancé's mother's demand for the family ring, a small assertion of self against a controlling matriarch. Beyond that, the film is content to be a grief-to-romance arc with stock characters. The cast is white to a person, save Tina Lifford in a minor supporting turn, and race never enters the conversation. There are no queer characters, no body politics, no environmental conscience. Fly fishing and a memorial peace garden exist to make people feel things, not to make points. Money drives everything, the secret account, the inheritance, the DNA test, yet it is framed as a question of personal decency, of who deserves the million, not as an indictment of the arrangement that produced it.

The lone moment of sermonizing arrives when Gray, mid-argument, declares that catch and release fishermen are cruel and ought simply to eat their fish. It lands as a quirk, not a thesis. We are left with a modest vintage: pleasant enough, faintly sour, with almost no ideological sediment. The cellar can hold it indefinitely.