The longing for destiny is nowhere more acute than in our romantic lives. Who among us has not hoped to stumble by total accident into the woman or man of our dreams? Who has not imagined that perfect connection, the one that feels instantaneous yet promises to last a lifetime? We have all crossed our fingers for that ineffable, magical link to someone else's heart . . . but what if such a wish literally came true?
Return To Me is an enchanted romantic comedy starring Minnie Driver and David Duchovny. David Duchovny stars as a recently widowed architect who is trying to get his life back. Minnie Driver is a waitress working in an Irish-Italian restaurant who has just received a new lease on life through a heart transplant. Drawn together by the playful fates, they must prove that love is made possible by much more than a few fast heartbeats. This sophisticated contemporary fairy tale, directed and co-written by Bonnie Hunt, melds heartache and humor, bittersweet yearning and bewitching romance as it spins a life-affirming story about the struggle to make sense of love, loss and the unexpected.
The setting for this tale is a whimsical Chicago - rooted in offbeat Italian, Irish and Polish traditions, yet tinged with something slightly magical. This is where Bob Rueland (Duchovny) has led a blessedly ordinary life as an architectural engineer and loving husband until one nightmarish night takes the life of his driven zoologist wife Elizabeth (Joely Richardson). Haunted by her memory and still desperately in love, Bob buries himself in work, hoping to complete the project that meant more to Elizabeth than anything else: building an expansive new gorilla habitat for the primates she was working with at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Nearly a year after Elizabeth's death, despite the match-making efforts of his veterinarian friend Dr. Charlie Johnson (David Alan Grier), Bob is still not quite ready to start all over again.
Meanwhile, across town, a waitress who has been waiting her entire life to start all over again has finally gotten her chance. Grace Briggs (Driver) has just received a long-awaited heart transplant that will save her from the medical fate that took her own mother's life while she was still a child. A recluse until now, Grace is exhilarated and frightened by a whole new world in front of her. Grace lives above O'Reilly's Italian restaurant - the best and perhaps the only, Irish-Italian joint in the city, owned by her grandfather. There, amidst the comic mix of boiled cabbage and ravioli, of Sinatra and Crosby, she is judiciously guarded by a colorful coterie of neighbors, relatives and friends. These include her Irish grandfather Marty O'Reilly (Carroll O'Connor), her Italian uncle Angelo Parpadillo (Robert Loggia) and their multi-ethnic, senior citizen's lonely-hearts club including Emmet (Eddie Jones), Wally (William Bronder) and Sophie (Marianne Muellerleile). Also among Grace's guardians are her best friend Megan (Bonnie Hunt), who has the consummate political skills only a mother of five can have, and Megan's proudly proletarian husband, Joe (James Belushi).
Into this weird and wonderful world stumbles Bob, whose brief and random encounter with Grace at O'Reilly's leaves him flummoxed but feeling something for the first time in a long time. Yet even as events and the many denizens of O'Reilly's push Bob and Grace inexorably towards one another, love takes on a whole new meaning as the truth emerges, resulting in a funny and touching tale of hard-won union.
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