By turns affecting and amusing, and quite often both at once, the film focuses on Mathias (Kevin Kline), a nearing-60 New Yorker who has little to show for his life until now but three failed marriages and the same number of unpublished novels. Mathias thinks his luck could be changing when, after the death of his estranged father, he learns he has inherited a spacious Paris apartment that might be sold for a handsome sum.