Return to Me

Grace (Minnie Driver), dying of heart disease, receives first the orphaned pump of a doomed zoologist (Joely Richardson), and then the woman’s doleful husband, Bob (David Duchovny). For most of the movie, only the heart is aware of this odd, organ-centered threesome; indeed, the transplanted muscle seems to stage-manage the entire romance. This is a very old-fashioned kind of magic unrealism, one typical of a film that is determinedly atavistic. Grace and Bob are nice, sweet people—innocents really—and both Driver and Duchovny have the courage to play them that way, straight. The narrative also pauses often to linger on the sort of yeasty secondary characters usually missing from today’s top-heavy cinema.