Plot
This is a movie about a marine biologist, Mary Beth, who is a single parent and leads a hectic life with her two impossible daughters, Judith and Nora. She, along with her research partner Becky, are trying to study and save a beautiful dolphin named Roxanne. Living next door to Mary Beth is Terry, a single dad and musician, who is the ineffective owner of Zeus, as well as being pretty inept at fathering--it looks in the beginning of the movie as if Jordan is taking care of him. After giving Mary Beth a terribly unfortunate morning by chasing her cat and wrecking her outdoor garden, Zeus proceeds to stow away on one of Mary Beth's boat trips, which really annoys Mary Beth. However, she suddenly turns the boat to follow the dolphin, and Zeus slips off the boat and into a pod of sharks. This is when she finds out that the dog and the dolphin can do "interspecies communication" as Roxanne saves Zeus' life and actually gives him a ride back to the boat on her back. Of course, as a scientist, she is intrigued and curious.
Claude, Mary Beth's partner, is a cold-hearted researcher who sees the dolphins as objects, not living beings. He is most interested in making a great deal of money through research grants, and in trying to flirt with Mary Beth, although he does not care for her but only wants to co-opt her skill and talent and defeat her own attempts to re-integrate Roxanne back into the ocean environment--he wants grant money to come to his research, not hers. However, Mary Beth is going to be otherwise occupied on both the professional and romantic fronts. She is working with Roxanne and Zeus to understand their interspecies communication, in order to re-introduce Roxanne, a "research dolphin", back into the wild. She studies Roxanne's interaction with Zeus, and knows that both animals actually have feelings for one another, which makes her far more inclined to see them as beings with personalities.
Through the conniving of their respective children, to make things even more complicated, Mary Beth and Terry end up going out, and she learns to be a little less uptight and a bit more understanding of the unexpected. However, things get tense when Claude kidnaps Roxanne, planning to kill the dolphin to frustrate Mary Beth's plans, and has Zeus along in the process, to the dog's endangerment. In the end, it's a race to save the dolphin and Zeus, and in the dramatic conclusion, Mary Beth and Terry find they have far more in common than pets and kids.
Read more about this topic: Zeus And Roxanne
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)