Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) stumbles into the film with a drink in hand, and for the bulk of the film's running time, she's getting refills. She's angry because her deadbeat husband has disappeared without a note; she deduces that he's run off to Sweden with his secretary, who also disappeared from work the same day. Terry, who was likely a drinker before her husband left, becomes a sort of professional drinker afterwards, as she attempts to deal with life as the single mother of four strapping young girls: Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood), a shy girl with a crush on a soulful bungee jumper; Emily (Keri Russell), a dancer who manages to eat once in a while; Hadley (Alicia Witt), a skeptic who's headed back to college; and Andy (Erika Christensen), who doesn't want to go to college.

Perhaps if this film hadn't been dumped in the dead zone of late winter, people would be talking Oscar about Joan Allen's performance as the deeply flawed, sometimes completely unlikeable Terry Wolfmeyer. Mike Binder reportedly wrote the movie for her; he wanted to give her a juicy starring role, and he succeeded. The character is all over the map emotionally, and Allen rides the roller coaster like the pro she is (if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor). She's processing her deep anger and concomitant self-doubt at being abandoned, as well as dealing with her new role as head of household and burgeoning alcoholic, all with a dry wit and understatement. She's also the most attractive woman onscreen: she's surrounded by the sylph-like young actresses who play her daughters, but, even at nearly 50, Allen makes them look like paper dolls.

The film follows three years in the lives of the Wolfmeyers and Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), who was Mr. Wolfmeyer's friend and who becomes Terry's drinking buddy and eventual lover. He's a former World Series pitcher who has a schizophrenic relationship to his baseball past: he refuses to talk about baseball on his daily radio show, but he supports himself by appearing at mall openings and selling autographed baseballs. I have to rave about the all-new, 2005 edition of Kevin Costner. I loved him in this movie in a way that I haven't felt since Bull Durham. It's been so long that he was this relaxed, completely at ease, in a part that it was easy to forget how good he can be. Is this just a limited actor being himself? I don't know; I don't know Costner in real life. But limited actors can be good, even great—Tom Cruise and Jennifer Aniston come to mind as limited actors who can be really good, if given the right material. This material—an aging former superstar, unsure of what to do with the rest of his life and hanging on a little too tightly to the past—was perfect for Costner. It's almost like sitting in on Costner's counseling session. It's no coincidence that he's playing a baseball player, when his greatest triumphs, at least as an actor, came on the baseball field.

Let's get my complaints out of the way. The worst person in the cast, and the worst thing in the movie, was Mike Binder, the writer/director who appears as Shep Goodman, Denny's longtime friend and producer. He's basically vapid, and there are two kinds of vapidity in acting: the kind that arises out of good acting, and the kind that arises out of bad acting. He came across in this movie as the latter. In addition to Binder's bad performance, the character didn't really need to be in the film at all. All of the situations where he appeared stunk of padding, of the writer/director/actor making sure he was in the film. The twenty or so minutes he was onscreen as an important character could have been excised entirely; he could have been replaced with, or confined himself to being, just a smartass in the studio where Denny works.

There are two particular kinds of scenes that I don't like; they strike me as evidence of laziness on the part of the writer. Actually, there are probably a lot more than two kinds, but these two popped up in this film. First is the embarrassing dinner in a restaurant, where one person is behaving like an ass, yelling and screaming while the others look around nervously at the other patrons, who are all staring and looking annoyed. I've never seen a situation like this in real life, but I've seen hundreds of them at the movies. Maybe I go to the wrong restaurants. The other is the laughing scene: for no apparent reason, one person starts laughing, then, slowly, sort of like the Slow Clap, everyone else joins in. I assume that the audience is supposed to join in too. I am seldom that amused by such a tired meme.

There are subplots: some good, some not. I liked Popeye's budding romance with the bungee jumper, especially her suspicion when he claims to be gay to avoid kissing her. There are a couple subplots that attempt to show how Terry's self-involvement has crippled her ability to relate to her daughters. I didn't much like the one involving Hadley's secret engagement, because it leads to the embarrassing dinner scene, but I really liked Terry's struggles with Emily over Emily's desire to go to a dance school instead of a "regular" college. It sounds typical, but it resolves itself nicely and provides Terry with some opportunity for self-reflection. The ending was a tiny bit disappointing, although it was surely a surprise. It felt uncomfortably like Terry was being punished for her righteous anger at her husband. I don't want to go into details, but you'll see, and you can decide if I'm right. Any disappointment I felt about elements of this movie was overshadowed by the fine performances of Kevin Costner and Joan Allen, especially the latter. It's nice to see a romantic comedy (of sorts) about aging baby boomers that manages to be funny and insightful.