One day as Dan (Jude Law) is walking down the streets of London, he watches as a young lady is struck (Natalie Portman) by a taxi as she crosses the street. Being the nice guy that he is - or at least wants her to perceive, he helps her to the hospital to get stitched up, where she tells him that her name is Alice. They walk together as Dan heads to work, and she finds out about his girlfriend, but Dan seems interested anyway.
Fast-forward a bit (in real life, not in the movie), and Dan is having his picture taken by Anna (Julia Roberts) for a book cover. The subject of his novel is none other than Alice, who has replaced his former girlfriend, and it turns out that about a year has elapsed. This will be a recurring theme. As their photo shoot winds up, Dan tells Anna that she is beautiful and he simply must have her. Unfortunately, Alice overhears the conversation. Woops.
Next we see Dan on the couch at home while he types online, pretending to be "Anna" in a chat room. He's talking with Larry (Clive Owen), a doctor looking for love in all the wrong places. While the subject of the conversation isn't one I'll repeat here, at the end, Dan/Anna convinces Larry to meet him at the aquarium - where the real Anna hangs out. So Larry shows up, meets the real Anna, embarrasses himself, and they rapidly figure out that they were had (and Anna thinks she knows who did it too).
A few months later and Anna is having a show for her artwork, but now she and Larry are dating. Dan isn't happy that his little joke backfired so badly, and he tries to get Anna to run away with him. Larry, meanwhile, is taken with Alice's youthful beauty, but it doesn't seem that anything comes of it.
Quickly we jump forward another year or so, and we find Dan and Alice breaking up because Dan and Anna have been having an affair. Meanwhile, Anna and Larry, who just got married, are breaking up because not only were Dan and Anna having an affair, but Larry had a rendezvous during a business trip to New York. Confused yet? Just wait.
Now that everyone is broken up, Dan and Anna actually get together, and a couple months after this (again, real time - only a couple minutes on-screen time elapse), Larry shows up in a strip club, where he sees Alice, who insists that her name isn't Alice, but "Jane Jones". She will be happy to take off her clothes for him, but she doesn't want to do anything else, and she isn't interested in anything more happening.
Then a couple months after this, we see the happy couple (that is Dan and Anna) at a theater of some sort, and find out that Anna just slept with Larry in order to get the divorce papers signed. Unfortunately, Dan can't handle the fact that this happened, and it means that they now break up for good. When Dan goes to talk to Larry about it, Larry tells Dan to get over it, and go back to Alice, who has been found in a strip joint.
In the final time warp, Dan and Alice are in an airport hotel and getting ready to head to New York when Dan says he has to know what happened between Alice and Larry - but Alice doesn't want to tell him. Dan insists, and in the end, Alice says that she can't take any more, and she finally has decided that she just doesn't love him any more. So Dan finally has lost everyone.
Alice heads back to New York, where we see her passport, and her real name was indeed "Jane Rachel Jones". Then we see Dan walking through a park, where he sees the name "Alice Ayres", which was the name Alice gave him. The final scene shows Larry and Anna in bed together, presumably peacefully. Whew. What a whirlwind - but mostly because of trying to keep up with how much time had elapsed between each scene.
Rated R for sequences of graphic sexual dialogue, nudity/sexuality and language.
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