Sometimes, God actually is found in the details. And sometimes, so are the makings of a good story.

Taken in its broad strokes, "In Her Shoes" promises to be a movie with no surprises up its sleeve. The set-up is something we've all seen before and the end is never in much doubt. Rose Feller (Toni Collette) is a mousy lawyer who makes up for her lousy romantic life by throwing herself into her work and periodically adding to a really great shoe collection that she never seems to wear. It's kind of a Sex and the City without the sex or even the city, just mostly a commute.

The bane of Rose's existence is Maggie (Cameron Diaz), her younger sister and flamboyant opposite. Maggie is beautiful, promiscuous, marginally employable and devoid of common sense. Whatever mess Maggie manages to get herself into you can bet she'll share the fallout with Rose. Sure enough, the one time Rose manages to bed a really hot co-worker she gets a call in the middle of the night to rescue Maggie who is passed out at her high school reunion. Worse, Maggie crushes Rose's budding romance by sleeping with the guy.

After the "hell hath no fury" scene we get ready to settle down for the predictable slog towards reconciliation, they are sisters after all. But "In Her Shoes" is a patient movie and detours into the ripple effect of this emotional explosion. Maggie blows town and Rose quits her job. In the process we meet their extended family and gradually form a picture of the wounded childhood that created the fiercely protective and dependent bond holding the two sisters together. As an audience we not only expect a reconciliation we come to care about it.

Maggie moves into a Florida retirement community to sponge off her estranged grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) but instead finds a place where she can finally fit in and add some value. There is a lot of humor that can be milked from the bikini-clad Diaz sunbathing next to a pool that usually offers no hotter action than water aerobics and "In Her Shoes" pulls it off with a great deal of charm.

Rose, meanwhile, falls in love with a great guy, gets engaged, and then manages to torpedo the relationship without any assistance from Maggie.

One of the real pleasures of "In Her Shoes" is that it takes the time to be funny. There's a sharp wit woven throughout the dialogue - a lot of it delivered on the sly - and Curtis Hanson's direction gives it just enough room to grab our attention and give us a laugh. Maggie's key argument for reconciling with Rose is that they belong together "like Sonny and Cher." When Rose points out the obvious - that Sonny and Cher did, in fact, break up - Maggie retorts without missing a beat "but they remained close".

Cameron Diaz is amazing, holding her own with Shirley MacLaine and Toni Collette, both high powered acting talents. In a movie that is primarily about the relationships of women she could have been blown off the screen but instead lights up the story's center.

In the end the sisters get back together as we knew they inevitably would. But the journey has been quirky, funny and very satisfying. You'll leave the theater feeling like they earned it.

Bruce Bulloch writes regularly and can be reached at wseditor@robinsonnews.com