Caught another Heather Graham love story on cable.

Heather teams up with Colin Firth (of the Bridget Jone's Diary films) for a not-quite-as-heated film as Killing Me Softly was.

Colin plays, well, Colin, a poor sap who believes girlfriend Vera (Minnie Driver) had dumped him in England. He finds a little town named Hope, that he picked because of the name, and travels there to sit in his hotel room and pine away his ills, and hopefully rejuvenate himself through portraits of townspeople he draws. Heather plays Mandy, a local girl who works at the retirement home as a care giver, at the hotel matron's (Mary Steenburgen) suggestion she comes to help Colin recover.

While I like everyone involved, I'm glad I caught it on cable and didn't directly pay anything for it. I happened to have some magazines to flip through, or I would have likely just turned the channel after a while. It's a cute little story, and maybe if I end up finding myself in front of it again I'll get more out of it, but I don't think so.

Mediocre misunderstandings ensue that are meant to stimulate the drama.

The situations simply caused me to reinforce my personal stance that if you're caught in what appears to be a questionable situation, simply provide the truthful explanation, and deal with whether that is accepted, not try to deal on the futile foundation provided by the misunderstandings. When your girlfriend wonders why your ex-girlfriend caught you without your pants on (as happened in one scene), respond with the truthful explanation that she appeared moments after she'd left, and you thought it was her as you noticed her scarf on the chair back, and like a dork answered the door in what you thought was a playful state, not the embarrassment it really was. Don't just respond with some muttered "oh, yeah, that looks bad, doesn't it?"

Instead, the film relied on the pathetic inability of the characters to explain themselves to cause questionable situations to blossom into more unreasonable misunderstandings.

The love interest grows quickly just because he's a repressed Englishman and she's a bit, uh, easy. Since she can't come up with anything really helpful, she tries to break the stress by disrobing, suggesting he does the same. In nearly every scene from then until the misunderstandings begin, they're either heading to or finishing from a rendezvous.

The ex-girlfriend conflict is simply Mandy's insecurity giving way to Vera's confidence and longer history with Colin. Vera's just a bitter ex-girlfriend; played well, Minnie. She admits that she did a horrible trick on Colin wherein he thought she'd married someone else, but what an unreasonable stretch it was to think he'd blow it off as the joke she tried to intend it to be.

A cynical twist is attempted when Colin enlists the mayor's (Oliver Platt) help to try to distract Vera from her quest to reunite them. Due to a commonality in their names, Vera is led to believe that she's descended from the town's founder. In what could have grown into an interesting twist of Colin's character, he cracks and admits the ploy, pointing out that her name is misspelt, and that Tom and Catherine Zeta Jones are not really in her family tree. The scene lasts as long as the cop jokes in the doughnut shop in Wayne's World, and except for setting up the end scenes, provides little to the characters or plot.

In the end, through unc-lever trickery, Colin convinces Mandy that he and Vera are not a couple, and that they should be. Vera ends up with the mayor, and the rest of the townspeople that matter are happy that Colin carries Mandy across town and will apparently be happy ever after.

All's well that ends well, right?