在这部神魂颠倒喜剧/剧情/爱情片中,Charles meets Laura in the the government office where they both work and is instantly smitten. Unfortunately, Laura is not completely unattached but merely separated from her husband. Charles optimistically pursues a relationship with her - an endeavor made more difficult by his exasperating roommate, Sam, and his somewhat daft mother, Clara. Charles and Laura fall in love nevertheless, but struggle with their friends and family.
Charles is a Salt Lake City civil servant who loves (*LOVES*) Laura, a lovely housewife with a lovely step-daughter and an A-frame-selling, ex-quarterback husband named Ox. His roommate is "an unemployed jacket salesman," his mother is a spacey, laxative overdosing, overly eccentric basket-case, his perpetually happy sister finds love in the dorkiest of guys, his step-father has a jones for Turtle Wax and his boss asks him for advice about his Ivy League son's sexual problems. He listens to Janis Joplin and dreams of getting Laura back once and for all. He does everything in his power to win her back from Ox, and the lengths he goes to provide the structure of the film in this bittersweet romantic comedy...a film that explores what happened to the Woodstock generation when they transcended their idealism (i.e. it was expected that they fall in love and face the music of routine). Charles is perhaps the quintessential saint of this ideology.
