I have long ago given up the hope that films described by film critics as “laugh-out-loud funny” or “hilarious” will stand up to their hype. The same is true for Committed. Fortunately, I am jaded enough by past disappointments not to expect this film to be any more “wildly entertaining” than any of the others similarly billed. In that, this film lived up to my expectations — or rather my lack of expectations. Which kept me from being disappointed and rating it “Not Worth It”. I am firmly convinced that film critics are the reason why films like this get panned so much by the movie-going public because they go expecting to find what they read in the paper and end up missing what is actually there.

And with this film, there is a lot that is actually there. Despite lacking a super-sized yuck factor, this film does have merit. Quirky, nicely written, and funny in a rather understated kind of way. While I wasn’t rolling on the floor laughing, there are some very funny parts of this movie and it held my interest.

Heather Graham usually strikes me as a fairly insipid actor, but her jejune qualities seemed more like an subtle grace in her approach to the character of Joline.

Joline is an unusual woman: one of integrity who keeps her word even at great expense to herself, a mystic with the kind of faith that can move mountains. Which she will need after her husband Carl (played to annoying perfection by Luke Wilson) leaves her and heads off to Texas to “find himself”. Living in New York, he is dissatisfied with life because he doesn’t believe he is living to his full potential working as a photographer who desires to be in the blood and guts of real news coverage, but is paid for shooting photos of food. So he takes off for greener pastures in — uh, well, El Paso, of all places where there does not appear to be discernable pastures at all or anything more than desert landscape as far as the eye can see. And can’t we talk mounds about the symbolism of that little journey? But we won’t.

Joline follows her wandering husband, committed to finding him, protecting him, and winning him back, which course she pursues with amazing dedication until she becomes committed in quite a different way after Carl has her locked up for what he perceives as harrassing and erratic behavior. A bit hypocritical, in that once Joline finds Carl in El Paso, she discovers that, aside from a change of scenery, he really hasn’t made much progress at all in changing his life. He has quickly become involved with another woman, is still shooting food photos, and still lives out the daily drudgery of his life searching for someone else to blame for why his life is not going the way he wished it could. Isn’t “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome” one definition of insanity?

In the end, Carl, who was never apparently committed in any sense of the word—though he should have been—ends pretty much the same as at the beginning, while Joline, who was committed in every sense of the word good and bad, somehow comes through her cathartic journey better and stronger.