Film

As unlikely couples go, Kingsley and Leoni would certainly rank high on anybody's list. It's part of the charm of this offbeat comedy that, despite a 20-year age difference, their scenes together are convincingly flirtatious and utterly real. The fact that they pull it off is made more remarkable by the fact that Kingsley is playing Frank, an alcoholic hit man going through the first months of AA, hardly a romantic catch. Frank has been sent to San Francisco to dry out by his Buffalo bosses, who also set him up with a job in a mortuary, which at least takes advantage of his professional comfort around dead bodies.

When Frank meets the grieving but pragmatic Laurel (Leoni), he's charmed. The two begin a spiky romance while Frank struggles with the whole 12-step process (How do you make amends—step nine—when you've done a sloppy job of killing someone because you were drunk? Send a small gift to the survivors, decides Frank).

Dahl and his cast smartly avoid the broader comic possibilities. Kingsley gives a wonderful, distinctive performance that at first seems downright bizarre in its stiffness and lack of affect. But the further we get into the movie, the more we see Frank open up to life. Leoni is his match, creating a character who is quirky, sexy and utterly believable. Their scenes together have a terrific sense of ebb and flow that is rare in movies but the norm in life. This is such a charming character study that we were a bit disappointed when some off-the-shelf mobster plotting crops up near the end, but by then we were smiling too much to care.