If you're grammatically minded, the first thing you notice about Kissing Jessica Stein may be that the character is more the object than the subject of her own title. After all, it's others who kiss her. And it's those characters -- making daring, decisive moves as Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt) waits passively for career, friends and love to fall into place -- who invite the audience's identification. These other two points of the traditional love triangle are the real hero and heroine of this movie: Josh Myers (Scott Cohen), publishing coworker and old flame, and Helen Cooper (Heather Juergensen), a dynamic museum coordinator who becomes Jessica's current flame. Still single past the age her loving but pushy family finds appropriate, and wistfully lonely after a long string of lousy men, Jessica responds to Helen's personal ad and finds an emotional harmony more complete than any she's known.

Jessica's farcically hesitant experimentation and her comic inability to differentiate between a loving friendship and romantic love could easily have been offensive, if Helen were not such a confident counterpoint. The premise skirts a demeaning voyeurism harking back to the days of draconian decency regulations, when federal law required "moral" endings for fiction to legally move through the mail. As in the pulp novels of that era, a homosexual relationship flourishes in the middle of Kissing Jessica Stein, only to retrench at the last minute. But in this case, the reversal defies convention rather than obeying it. After reaching the structural climax of all comedy -- the protagonists happily united at a wedding -- this movie dares another act and achieves a more complex statement. Instead of allowing romantic love to conquer all in the same over-simple trope that formed Jessica's confused expectations in the first place, Kissing Jessica Stein asserts that platonic and sexual loves are distinct, each precious, vital, and incapable of substitution.

Like the hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), among other memorable movies slightly outside the mainstream, Kissing Jessica Stein was written and produced by its stars. Creating roles for themselves, Westfeldt and Juergensen achieve the kind of thorough characterizations associated with independent film, while also displaying the gloss typical of a major distributor (Fox Searchlight Pictures). For example, Jessica is a fairly observant Jew, while Helen is a mostly secular Christian, and this carries beyond the obligatory Hanukkah/Christmas scene into family expectations, until Helen's repeated "I attended a Seder once" becomes a symbol as well as a joke.

I caught Kissing Jessica Stein on the Oxygen channel one evening, flipping in by chance as it began. Televised movies are inevitably edited for length, if not content, and I enjoyed this one enough that I will see it again, uncut. But for now I cannot speak for any missing pieces, just the funny, sweet, sincere and sometimes uncomfortable story crammed between commercials. Unlike the denizens of too many recent romantic comedies, all its characters are good people with whom I was happy to spend time. More, it touched and surprised me by bothering to distinguish friendship in its own right, where our culture often dismisses "just friends" as stunted romance. I expect the movie is only better when viewed as intended.