Aniston makes new friends

Jennifer Aniston is Justine, a thirtysomething stuck behind the check-out counter, unfulfilled, no longer a teenager, with a house-painter husband (John C Reilly) who has an after-work beer can eternally in his hand and a low sperm count lodged in his loins.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Justine's new and younger co-worker in Retail Rodeo, a small-town convenience store like a tacky shed that gives ageing matrons "freebie" makeoversat the cosmetics counter, is a sad case, too. He's taken refuge in the name of "Holden" (as in "Caulfield", the rebel teenager of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye), though at home he's called Tom - "My slave name," he says miserably.

Driven by the desperation of their dead-end prospects, these two are attracted to share their burgers in the lunch hour, then come together more fulfillingly in the store-room and by the lake.

What follows in this modest film about suburban anomie, directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White (the couple who collaborated on the homosexual stalker comedy Chuck and Buck), is low-key, but authentic and very well observed. It's the story behind the kind of domestic tiffs and larger tragedies you read in a thousand local weeklies. But the cast's excellence in showing unfulfilled lives with the unconsciousness of people watched through two-way mirrors is what gives it edge and often uncomfortable truth.

Justine's adulterous moment soon becomes the motel assignation. Then her husband's best-buddy, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), a bib-and-braces satyr with a toxic leer, gets wind of the infidelity and turns it to his own carnal advantage with a bit of coercive blackmail.

You can see the danger signals before pregnancy sets them at red... Even then it keeps you focused, wondering if Justine will opt for the dead-end life with her couchpotato hubby, or light out on the open road with her passionate but unpredictable lover.

Gyllenhaal's talent for playing kids who are mentally askew has already been put to impressive use in Donnie Darko. Here he begins by performing delicately on the white notes of hurt and immaturity, but the gradual revelation that he's a dangerous obsessive, too, adds an ominous note to Justine's affair.

The social background has more depth than you at first expect. All the basics of a perky sitcom are present in the daily to-and-fro of the Rodeo Retail staffers, the Bible-pushing security guard, the clerk who paints and powders the ever-hopeful ladies at the lipsticks-and-lotions stand, the bulky boss broadcasting moral messages to the staff - ("He was a thief and a disturbed individual. The lesson for you folks is, don't steal ... don't disturb").

But perfect casting all along the line gives each of them a humanist identity: if they're slightly bizarre, custom has made them so. But when all's said, it's Aniston's film, and she's to be congratulated for choosing this small but detailed bit of the human wasteland for her transition from the churning status quo of a TV superseries like Friends.

She lets you feel how life at this level of community for a woman who's not too smart, but isn't dumb, either, sets traps of tedium and temptation that can turn a girl, before she realises what's happening to her, into the American hinterland's Emma Bovary.