text: A lot of the comments people have made strike me as (sorry) missing the point. Kasdan wants to present life, simply, ordinary life. The conventionally structured story, where characters have insights that change their lives, and then fade out, music up, and the film is over, is absorbed into this much larger canvas. Several characters in this movie have just such illuminations, and then they move on. Sometimes they can hold onto their insights, sometimes they can't, and that's the way life really is. In other words, Kasdan jettisons conventional dramatic structure in favor of an exploration of the the ongoingness of life  there is no happy ending, only an eventual ending; and everything before that is still in process, still always up for grabs  and, if you absolutely insist on a theme, an exploration of the role of the miraculous in our lives. What is a miracle? Well, life itself, for a start. Then add in all the random incidents and cross-connections that make up a life, or several interconnected lives, and you have miracles by the bucketful. Kasdan underscores this theme lightly, rather than insisting on it, and bolsters it in various ways, most memorably by the device, right in the center of the film, of having Mac and his wife, lying in bed, each dreaming their own dreams, but as well showing, later on in the film, how those dreams have the power, within the film, to shape reality. This is not a film with an easy or obvious message. You just have to let it play out in front of you, and then let it sit in your mind for a few days, a month, a few years, and see what it has wrought there. This is, without a doubt, Kasdan's best film, his most mature, his most humane. A major meditation on life from one of our most gifted writers and directors. The tragedy is, of course, that he has not been allowed to work for a number of years now, mostly due to studio constraints around "Dreamcatcher." Hopefully we haven't heard the last from Larry Kasdan. A great film from a great artist. Keep in mind that art does not have to rationalize itself completely in order to succeed.