Three-year-old-movie-whose-ending-is-predictable spoiler alert

I watched "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" last night - a compromise with a female friend who wasn't interested in the raw performances in "Black Snake Moan" - and was really convinced that Kate Bosworth should have ended up with Mark Josh Duhamel, the hunky actor, not Topher Grace, her bitter coworker. The writing was so perfect that I ended up sympathizing much more with a man I'm nothing like, rather than the guy who is basically a West Virginia version of me. This movie is an accidental metaphor for our misplaced dreams of discovering love where we've always had it. Let me explain.

1. Tad Hamilton (Duhamel) starts as a hard-drinking womanizer who can't even keep his housekeepers straight, but he shows gentleness, introspection and humility out of character with his bad-boy image at his "charity date" with Rosalee (Bosworth). It's not just him acting to clean up his image and get the hot new movie role, I'm convinced. He is a perfect gentleman the entire evening, aside from smoking in the limo, and appears genuinely convicted that he live up to Rosalee's confidence that he has his priorities straight.

2. Pete (Grace) is a sulking, resentful little man who lords his position over Rosalee and her friend, who blithely ignore his tinpot despotism, at the Piggly Wiggly. He claims to have Rosalee's best interests at heart, warning her as Tad's charity project becomes active romantic pursuit that Tad is just an actor who wants her "carnal treasure." But as Rosalee tells him upon his much-delayed declaration of love, "you waited 22 years to tell me this?" Pete does little but insult Rosalee's intelligence, try to stop her outings with Tad (by telling her to pick up a late shift in one scene), and is otherwise evasive and impotent when it comes to his real motivation for intervening in her budding Hollywood love story.

3. Interactions between Tad and Pete show who the better man is, by far. After Tad buys a farm, a signal both to Rosalee of his long-term interest and to his manager of his changed priorities, Pete tries to humiliate him by setting him up to flub farm chores. Pete, however, ends up looking like the idiot as Tad excels in milking and splitting wood and Pete himself flubs the manly duties. Tad is always gracious in these slights from the head-case power broker. He reminds me of a charismatic friend in Seattle who put up well with my competitive slights in trivial subjects, though he's far smarter and more determined than me on the whole.

4. The final straw comes when Pete confronts Tad, on the toilet in a bar restroom, and warns him not to break Rosalee's heart, or else he'll tear Tad apart "with my bare hands, or vicious rhetoric" (indeed a good line, and one I'd use). Uncomfortable-looking Tad nonetheless treats the episode with grace and calls Pete a good man for caring so much about Rosalee. What a punk.

5. The only goof shown by Tad is his attempt to get Rosalee to come back to LA when he gets the big new movie role. Rosalee is worried that Tad doesn't really love her as he states, because he doesn't know any details about her. (It's been a week - cut him some slack?) Tad repurposes Pete's toilet-recited list of Rosalee's six smiles, admittedly a conniving way to overcome her objection, and wins her over. On the plane, Tad misdiagnoses a Rosalee smile on command, and comes clean that Pete was the source of the six-smile analysis. He doesn't put up a fight when Rosalee demands to turn the plane around, and admits without resentment that indeed, his heart was broken of his own action.

6. Pete's behavior isn't exactly impressive relative to Tad. He nearly departs Rosalee's house without an objection when she says she's leaving for LA, and then makes his feelings known through a rather intrusive mouth-kiss before saying a word. He runs away from Frasier's Bottom (yes, that's the town name) apparently right after Rosalee leaves for LA, asking his longtime crush at the local bar to pack up his apartment as he leaves for what is apparently an open invitation to join Corporate in Richmond. Is this really a sympathetic character? He avoids his problems, uses passive aggression when he's upset, and runs away when he doesn't get his way, leaving his obligations to someone else.

The bottom line is, local and homespun doesn't always equal better. Frasier's Bottom is full of wonderful people without resentment, including Rosalee's starstruck but level-headed dad (the inimitable Gary Cole), but Pete is an exception. He takes out his own frustration with himself on the target of his affection and her suitor, and does nothing to earn Rosalee's sympathy, other than act as the know-it-all, self-righteous ass he's always been. Tad, by contrast, shows real growth, if full of the Hollywood naivete that suddenly discovers small-town charm and goes overboard in his pursuit of simplicity and authenticity.

Of course there's no way that Tad can know as much about Rosalee as Pete. It's unreasonable for her to expect Tad to have picked up a lifetime of her quirks and body language after such a short period. Perhaps it was unreasonable for Tad to ask her to come to LA after such a short romance - indeed, they never even "did the deed" (kudos to the writer for that!) before he left for LA. But Tad made clear to her that he didn't care about the role that he had previously wanted so badly that he did the win-a-date promotion. If she didn't come with him, there was no point. He valued her more than the role.

But Rosalee demanded perfection from a very imperfect Tad, who was trying hard to become a better person, and wouldn't let him abandon his Hollywood ambitions. She set up Tad to connive her into coming to LA with his fake insight into her facial expressions. Perhaps this is an indication that Rosalee - who later tells Pete in a climactic highway confrontation about his own signature smiles - has secretly wanted Pete for a long time but was just as nervous as Pete about coming clean. Tad had enormous potential to become a wonderful man, and perhaps he did later as a result of his heartbreak. Rosalee put him in the unenviable position of acting to show his love, instead of accepting his budding affection as genuine and his offer to settle down.

Like "American Beauty" and "Secretary" before it, "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" built up a solid plotline about the consequences of our actions before junking the logical end and throwing up its hands, to satisfy our delusions of perfect endings without responsibility. Kevin Spacey's pedophiliac dad doesn't regret his destructive bent after his murder. James Spader verbally abuses and physically exploits Maggie Gyllenhaal into a humiliating but successful sit-in for his love. And Kate Bosworth honors pangs of desire from a holier-than-thou superior who did nothing to earn her love but observe her face for 22 years without a peep as to his feelings, while scorning a reformed actor who shows her more tenderness and self-denial than she's ever experienced.

The lesson: Be a jerk, permanently, and you'll get the girl. Risk your comfortable life for a girl, and she'll fault you for having the balls. Perhaps this movie just reflects our conventional wisdom about what women really want.