In Rough Magic, Bridget Fonda plays Myra Shumway, a gifted magician's assistant who is ready to give up her vocation for a carefree life as the showpiece wife of Cliff Wyatt (D.W. Moffett), a slick and powerful politician. However, when he murders her mentor (Kenneth Mars), she flees to Mexico with a film of the incident. Along the way, Myra meets Doc Ansell (Jim Broadbent) who's been trying to acquire the Mayan elixir in the possession of a tribal shaman. It turns out that Myra is also destined to meet this medicine woman.

This wild and zany film, directed by Clare Peploe, mixes comedy with the magic realism of recent Latin American novels. Myra's encounter with the shaman brings her face-to-face with her own ambivalence about what she really wants out of life. "Real magic," as her mentor once told her, "comes from the heart." That's why Myra's experiences with Alex Ross (Russell Crowe), a disillusioned journalist, are so important. He helps her to see that following the path of the heart is the only way to go.