As Gray Matters opened, I got the feeling I was in for that classic, old-fashioned style romantic comedy like, say, Return to Me, or anything directed by Nora Ephron. “Cheek to Cheek” crooned on the soundtrack as Tom Cavanagh and Heather Graham strode around the dance floor like Fred and Ginger. Then we visited the stunning New York apartment that they share, spending their evenings cooking dinner and watching old movies. The perfect couple, right? Wrong.

When a dinner party guest asks how long they’ve been together, Sam (Cavanagh) insists that she must be joking. “Thirty years,” he says, revealing that he and Gray (Graham) are not lovers, but rather siblings and best friends. This little misunderstanding encourages them to go out and meet other people. “Maybe it’s time you date someone other than your brother,” Gray’s shrink tells her.

At a dog park, Gray immediately picks out—for her brother, we assume—a beautiful zoologist named Charlie. Sam and Charlie hit it off immediately, and decide to get married that very weekend in Vegas, dragging Gray along as a witness. Since it is bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding, Gray and Charlie banish Sam to the smaller room down the hall so the two of them can share the honeymoon suite. A few drinks and a performance of “I Will Survive” later, and Sam isn’t the only one who has fallen in love with Charlie. The rest of the film concentrates on Gray—patterned too blatantly on Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally—as she tries to cope not only with the fact that she is in love with a woman, but that the woman she loves is her brother’s wife.

If the story of a woman who learns that maybe the reason she hasn’t found Mr. Right is because she is actually looking for Mrs. Right sounds familiar to anyone else, it’s probably because it has already been done in 2001’s superior Kissing Jessica Stein. That’s not to say Gray Matters is not without its own unique charm. I liked the various references to classic movies—okay, so I’m a sucker for those—and the two delightful dance sequences made me long for a Fred and Ginger biopic.

Cavanagh and Graham have great chemistry together; and for that matter, so do Graham and Moynahan. Unfortunately, neither of those pairs forms a romantic couple in the film, and individually they come across rather bland—as does Sissy Spacek, the Oscar-winner inexplicably cast in the small role of the sport-loving shrink. I did enjoy Alan Cumming as the Scottish cabbie who falls hopelessly for Gray, but he is left in the movie for one scene too many.

The main problem of Gray Matters is its poor pacing, as each scene feels like it goes on a minute or two longer than it should. Take, for example, the scene in which Gray gets some psychotherapy on a rock climbing wall: the dialogue in the scene serves its purpose and then, well, I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s just say that something happens that gets a big laugh. Great, let’s cut the scene there and move on, the editor inside me pleads. Instead, the scene carries on for another couple minutes of pointless dialogue and ends with a whimper, instead of a bang. The movie as a whole suffers the same problem, ending a scene later than it should have.

I did see some potential in this film. After all, the idea of a brother and sister both falling in love with the same person is a rather intriguing premise. That potential was not fully realized, but the film does still provide a few laughs and some touching moments.

Gray Matters is rated PG-13 for “some mature thematic material, sexual content and language.” The rating is appropriate for the sexual content and partial nudity alone. The language is relatively mild, except for one major Molly Shannon outburst.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Gray Matters.