Shamefully underrated!

I was surprised to see the rather low IMDB score for this movie which is actually one of my top ten American independent movies of all time. It has a terrific cast, a great story and a great sub-story (or rather a sub-text to the main story), the different camera work serving as the differentiating element between the two. As a ‘film within a film’ type of movie, it superbly conveys the reality-fiction duality, centering on two main stories/plots: the ‘real’ story (shot dogma-style) and the ‘fictional’ story (shot in a standard way) thus allowing the viewer to distinguish between the two. It is a film about love and the search for love, the search for love in the right or wrong places, in ways which can be right or wrong. It engages with two developing love stories – one fictional, the other real. The ‘fictional’ story involves Roberts and Underwood’s characters (him - an up-and-coming Hollywood movie star, her –a journalist doing a cover story on him). The ‘real’ story running in parallel is about the potentiality of human relationships, with two protagonists who have not yet met in person and, through a prolonged online communication, have arranged to finally meet in person.
As the movie progresses, the sympathetic viewer’s anticipation and excitement for their upcoming meeting at the “Holiday Inn” in Tucson builds up giving the impression that this ‘love story in the making’ is essentially the leitmotif of the movie, engaging the viewer with these two people’s chance for romance and love and the opportunity to ‘get it right’ this time around. The ultimate reason why this movie resonates with me so deeply is the final scene of the chance encounter between the ‘real’ love story protagonists before they board the plane to Tucson (the irony being that both of them are based in L.A. and share a number of mutual acquaintances) with the two of them ending up sitting together on the plane. It is at this time that the viewer experiences a heart-warming ‘ooooh’ moment about how real love can work in mysterious ways, which is almost immediately followed by a shocking twist in the story: as the camera zooms out, what is revealed is – a movie set! Shattering all our illusions that the ‘real’ love story of the film will indeed develop, the ending is truly a pessimistic one, however, managing to depict in a masterful way the thin dividing line between art and life/ reality and film. Even though the film yet again confirms the age-old rule that accomplished love stories get a better chance in the fictional (movie) world, it also presents us with a challenge for a real-world chance worth taking.