Their disappearance has given time for their spouses (Isabella Rossellini and Ted Danson) to meet each other, and to start to like each other. Danson is a job-hopper who teaches ballroom dancing, lives upstairs over a Chinese restaurant and isn't too concerned about his wife's possibile infidelity: "Everybody has to do what they feel they have to do." But Rossellini does take it seriously, and the next day she tracks Danson down at his work to ask him if he thinks her husband and his wife are having an affair. This is, of course, the beginning of their own affair, although they're not ready to admit that for awhile.
The movie is intelligently directed by Joel Schumacher, who places these two affairs in the center of a lot of detail. This isn't one of those shallow movies that's about nothing except love. Instead we get inside the lives of these people: Petersen as the womanizing BMW salesman, Rossellini as the woman who has stopped loving him but wants to be faithful to him, Danson as a warmhearted misfit, Young as a woman who wandered into the wrong marriage by mistake.
And there are some other family members who are very important to the action, especially Danson's gruff old codger of a father (Lloyd Bridges), who has most of the best one-liners in the movie, and Danson's punkster son from an earlier marriage (Keith Coogan). Acting as kind of a chorus in the background are Rossellini's mother (Norma Aleandro), who loses one husband and gains another during the course of the movie, and Aunt Sofia (Gina DeAngelis), who is perfect as the bitter relative who attends every family event and mutters darkly in the background about everything she sees there ("That dress, you would wear to a hooker's wedding").
Rossellini and Danson are at the center of the story, however, because theirs is the romance based on true love, and they try, up to a point, to deny their feelings. And Rossellini is the key to everything.
She is so huggable in this movie, so funny, so sweet, that she brings sunshine into scenes that might otherwise seem contrived. She has one moment almost impossible to describe, when she and Danson have agreed to meet "accidentally" at a restaurant by bringing their families there. And as she looks up and is "surprised" to see Danson there, her joy and embarrassment and good humor all bubble up at once, and she almost breaks out laughing as she tries to go through with the charade.
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