Definitely, Maybe

At the beginning of Definitely, Maybe we are introduced to Will Hayes (Reynolds) who cynically describes his career in marketing as trying to convince kids to eat Captain Crunch instead of Lucky Charms. Right away he comes across as intelligent, funny, and slightly depressed. Hayes has just received his divorce papers, and a combination of this and his grade school daughter Maya (Breslin) being taught sex education that day (the scene where Hayes picks up Maya is fun: full of hysteric parents and children reading sex education literature like it's Harry Potter) leads us into the narrative framework for the real story: Maya wants to know how her father met her mother. But not the overly romantic, fairy tale version; the honest, heartbreaking one that leads to this divorce.

Some suspension of disbelief is required in regards to Maya not knowing her own mother well enough to pick her out of a line up of descriptions of three very different women, but the plot is executed well enough for this to be forgivable. The three potential mother candidates are Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher, and Rachel Weisz. In that order of actresses we are given: a Midwestern college girlfriend, a free spirited women who works with Hayes, and lastly a friend of the college girlfriend who's an intellectual and sleeping with a famous, drunk intellectual (played by Kevin Kline). It wouldn't be fun for me to give anything away, so I won't. For stories that have a sort of mystery to them on first viewing it's not fair to contaminate another's experience.

I will say though that the movie never commits one of the greatest sins a romantic film with several lover-candidates can do: It never once makes any of these women out to be horrible to a level that is one dimensional or uncaused from what we already know about them. One of the women values her professional integrity more than Hayes and his daughter calls her a "bitch" for this, but that judgment felt harsh, especially stacked up to truly bitchy characters in much worse films.

Without giving the plot away, I can say that the film is somewhat episodic. It jumps years into the future to allow time and the gaining of wisdom to affect characters. Going into the film I was worried that the narrative device of Hayes telling the story to his daughter would be nothing more than a gimmick, but it was done well and because all the women had depth and were lovable in their own ways it did create a fun, complex romance-mystery. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this film to anyone looking for a good romance.