WHO KNEW THAT divorce-lawyers-in-love could produce such a delightful, thoughtful film as Laws of Attraction -- with a pro-marriage, pro-commitment message no less?

Daniel Rafferty (Pierce Brosnan) is a slightly sloppy, seemingly laid-back top divorce gun, new to New York but not to the law courts. Audrey Woods (Julianne Moore) is another top lawslinger who  never has lost a divorce case.

She is all spiff and anxiety, secretly wolfing down Hostess Snowballs in a bathroom stall before proceeding to court. We first meet him asleep in the courtroom, noting, when she awakens him as opposing counsel by sticking her pencil eraser in his ear, “I liked that.”

At first look, it’s Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple, and you know where this is going. But there’s much more here than first meets the eye. The film delivers as an engaging romantic comedy.

 “Lawyers are scum,” says Rafferty as featured speaker at a legal seminar, “and divorce lawyers are the fungus under the scum. ... People in divorce courts do all this fighting. But where was all that passion when it was needed to fight for the marriage?”

He has written a best-selling book, is on the talk-show circuit and has a way with words.  But the funny thing is that he really means it. He’s a divorce lawyer who doesn’t believe in divorce. “Didn’t you ever want to just slap your clients?  Send them home and slap them silly?” Rafferty asks Audrey early on.

“No she replies. My clients marriages are a dead end ... dead in the water.”

“Ah, you’re not dating!” he replies.

And of course these two, battling each other in court, begin the classic dating roundabout themselves -- until, after a wild night in Ireland, where they have gone as opposing counsels to depose the staff of a contested castle, they wake up married.

 “Look at your left hand,” she gasps. “we’ve got to tell them we didn’t  mean it!”

“But what if I did mean it?”  he replies.  And therein lies the tale.

The cast is hilarious. Frances Fisher is both wise and off-the-wall as Audrey’s rock-and-roll mother, Sara, who never met a plastic surgeon she didn’t like. (“Are you really 56?” “Parts of me are ...”)  

And Michael Sheen and Parker Posey go wonderfully over the top as the rock star and fashion designer couple who own the castle, are furious with each other’s outside affairs, and in their own screeching, passionate craziness are working their way into monogamy.  In a way, they represent a generation for whom the concept is not a throwback but a new and unexpected direction.

As opposed to the “culture of the moment,” where commitment is viewed as cutting off options, Laws of Attraction is interestingly in tune with several Christian themes of long standing. 

 “I believe in order that I may know,” said St. Augustine. Instead of standing outside always questioning, the spiritual tradition understands that at some point the only way forward is to make a stand and to move on from within a committed relationship, and that commitment brings the freedom to grow.

The makers of this film understand those truths well.