An Innocently Adventurous Modern Fairy Tale, it's a True One-of-a-Kind

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2012)

Alternating between quirky, drab, conceptual and surreal, this fantasy what-if doesn't even march to the beat of any drummer in the classical sense. John Cusack and Cameron Diaz are unrecognizably pedestrian as a mismatched husband and wife at the end of their rope, both after the same thing in spite of one another. Their marriage, and the factors that lead to its quick, sad disintegration, may be the traditional center of the story, but along the way the plot jolts in so many wildly different directions that it's actually rendered secondary. Like a journey through the mind of a creative genius with serious ADD, it samples a dozen concepts strong enough to power their own film, then still finds a way to somehow marry them all into a single adventurous, mostly coherent, finale. Unclassifiable in the very best way, it's not something I could watch more than once every four or five years.