Bizarre Love Triangle

RESULTS (B+) -  Andrew Bujalski is maturing into a smart filmmaker. Here the godfather of Mumblecore takes a cast of established stars and turns the romantic comedy inside out and back again, as if shepherding it through a wormhole. The result is a quiet triumph.

In "Results," Guy Pearce is Trevor and Cobie Smulders ("How I Met Your Mother") is Kat, and they are personal trainers at his club, which he hopes to build into one of those all-encompassing life-and-health centers. They also have a past, which seems not so much romantic as physical.

Enter the irresistible Kevin Corrigan as Danny, a freshly minted millionaire looking for a personal trainer to get in shape but probably more for the companionship. Both Trevor and Kat conduct sessions with the pasty 40-something whose marriage has just ended. In one of Corrigan's many effective line readings, Danny tells Trevor he wants to be able to take a punch, a line that will come back to haunt him later in the film when Trevor finds out that Danny made a move on Kat.

Bujalski (whose "Computer Chess" was a pleasant surprise last year) takes his sweet time setting the characters in place and nudging the plot into motion. (He takes a little too much time wrapping things up, and he could have told the story in 95 minutes instead of 105.) The writer/director allows the actors to swim around in their characterizations, finding subtle nuances along the way.

Pearce is just a top-notch actor, and he unravels a fairly vulnerable muscle boy. Corrigan is a delight with his offbeat line readings, a poor man's Christopher Walken but with added depth. Smulders doesn't have much going on behind those eyes, but she expands her sitcom chops and brings aching emotion to the role of a still-young woman getting the runaround from a pair of well-meaning man-children. A scene in which Trevor and Kat dine with another couple nails the banter and dynamics of relationships incredibly well.

This has the smarts of "Annie Hall," but more mature dramatic flourishes and layers that Woody Allen rarely attempted to sew into a screenplay. It's a funny, textured, fully realized film.