OxfordPress.com

Grade: B

Verdict: An engaging "what if?" fantasy about the life not lived.

Details: Starring Rachel Griffiths and David Roberts. Rated R for sexuality and language. 1 hour, 44 minutes.

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Review: You sort of want to smack Pamela (Rachel Griffiths) when you meet her at the start of "Me Myself I."

She's a mope. Sure, she has a job she loves, winning awards for her incisive journalism. But she's entered her 30s and hit an emotional oil patch. "I'm supposed to be happily maried with two kids by now," she whines to one married, mothered pal. And she regrets having turned down old boyfriend Robert (David Roberts) when he proposed to her years earlier.

For the first few minutes of "Me Myself I," the movie seems to have a terminal case of the blues, literally: Pamela's messy apartment is painted in gloomy shades of the color. But the Australian comedy and Pamela both get a good shake-up when she steps into a city street and gets bumped by a minivan being driven by . . . herself.

For clarity, let's call her Pamela 2 (also played by Griffiths), a concerned soccer mom who whisks the first Pamela home to make sure she's OK. And then Pamela 2 disappears, leaving the first version trapped in this parallel life, which includes three children, a houseful of chores and her workaholic husband--yes, Robert.

Griffiths ("Hilary and Jackie") makes an art of benumbed comic reaction as she finds herself trapped in a nightmare of domesticity. She sits at the kitchen table sedated by the constant chatter of her instant children and stares in disbelief as the youngest asks for her help in the bathroom.

Like the Gwyneth Paltrow piffle "Sliding Doors," "Me Myself I" wants to examine the road not traveled. But whereas "Doors" was one-sided, giving initiative and chutzpah to only one of Paltrow's personas, "Me" is remarkably evenhanded in its treatment of both Pamelas' lives. One of the movie's neat gimmicks is the way all the people in her old world turn up in new, altered guises, including a cute but unavailable crisis counselor (Sandy Winton), who resurfaces as a single fellow writer who starts to flirt with her.

Like "Where the Heart Is," "Me" could be called a chick flick. But it gives its heroine intelligence, self-analysis and a healthy sex drive that leads to some of the movie's funnier scenes, as she puts the make on an exhausted hubby. Best of all, Pamela is far from faultless in either of her parallel lives; in fact, one of the nice plot-bombs in the movie is the gradual discovery of Pamela 2's not-so-noble activities.

Writer-director Pip Karmel energizes her film with charming comic bits, but she never loses sight of her bigger message--that regret for the road you didn't take is fruitless and that every choice in life contains compromise. "Me Myself I" makes a generous but clear-eyed case for both ways of life chosen by the two Pamelas. It gently assures us that the grass is always green--at least sometimes--on both sides.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service