Altogether The End of the Affair adds to the impression that it would be futile for Moore to work in a brisker popular form, but that's exactly what she does in Laws of Attraction, to spectacular effect. (Not that it was popular, but who can solve that mystery?) What's perfect for her is that the movie uses manic farce to crack the self-possession that usually keeps her so remote from us.

Her character Audrey Woods is a professional correlative of Moore: a top-shelf, Yale-trained, Manhattan divorce attorney who is too much of a control freak to have a romantic life. (In other words, she's playing the kind of woman most likely to identify with her as an actress.) In a high-profile case of the kind she's never lost, Audrey is thrown by the deceptively rumpled, low-key style of opposing counsel Daniel Rafferty (Pierce Brosnan), who enjoys discomposing her as they subsequently face off in a series of courtroom battles and subsequent media interviews (in which they speak in code to each other through the camera). They fall in love while breathing the toxic fumes of one failed marriage after another. They just might stand a chance--they've done all their fighting right upfront.

It's best to say outright that Laws of Attraction isn't close to perfect. If the details of the law and courtroom procedure and professional ethics strike you as odd (e.g., an attorney offering to settle a case for the amount of his own fee), the safer guess is that the screenwriters are just making shit up. On the other hand, much of the comic writing is first-rate, but not all of the lines or situations are as good as the best ones. And Michael Sheen and Parker Posey play a divorcing rock-star couple in a style that doesn't suit the movie and is grating in itself. (Posey, the most fearless comedienne of her generation, continues to baffle mainstream moviemakers.)

More problematic is that while Daniel falls for Audrey immediately, and keeps coming at her, that kind of amorous drive is beyond Brosnan, all the more so because it has to be inextricable from the competitive lawyerly tricks he plays on her. Daniel has to be anarchic, impulsive, manipulative, passionate, and steadfast. Brosnan, who doesn't have a star persona but doesn't fuse with his characters, either, isn't centered enough, isn't present enough, to be the embodiment of headlong romantic spontaneity. (It would have been a nifty, unironic pendant to George Clooney's peerless performance in the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty last year.)

Still, Brosnan is good at slyness and serves as a foil to set off Moore's tightly-wound, nutcracking A-student attorney. (She lays out an array of colored pens to take notes during trial and you know each color has a very specific application.) Frances Fisher as Audrey's 56-year-old mother, still very much interested in whatever game is afoot and dismayed by her stay-at-home daughter, also helps to bring Moore out by contrast. Fisher's smirk is the mother's sign of recognition that as difficult as life is, as much doing as it takes, it's still full of unexpected and intriguing opportunities. She may be a high-maintenance witch at some level (she objects to being called "Mom" in public), but she's right about her daughter, who should be taking a chance with Daniel, especially since she wants to, rather than sitting at home eating junk food and watching him on TV. (Fisher is teasingly smooth and has never been more effective.)