Diane Lane has reached the point in her career where her gifts as an actress are growing in inverse proportion to the quality of the scripts she is offered. The good news is this lets her pull off the almost athletic feat of rescuing Must Love Dogs from its own cozy banality. If acting is about portraying human complexity and contemporary romantic comedy is about doing away with it, it figures that any romantic comedy starring Lane—who can convey about six logically-related emotions in a single blink—will arm-wrestle itself to a stalemate.
Lane is Sarah, a childless teacher in her late 30s who has been divorced for eight months. Her father (Plummer, dapper as ever) and siblings find it unacceptable she has not attached herself to a new man. A round of Internet dating culminates with the discovery, fresh from his own weird career arc, of John Cusack as a boat-builder named Jake. At this point, it would make sense to let two entertaining actors entertain us, but alas, the numbers by which such films are painted require the temporary separation of our stars so they can whine to friends and date inappropriate people. Dogs have something to do with it, sort of.