A ranking of 200 jobs came out Monday on CareerCast.com. Biologists, historians and actuaries came out on top, while oilfield workers, lumberjacks, and newspaper reporters (in between sailors and stevedores) were at the bottom. So too — at #192 — are meter readers, two of whom are the subject of “Expired.” This is just the first in a long list of things that could make this movie execrable, a good movie to wash down with 800 Valiums and a frosty pint of Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road.

After being blind-sided by a now-successful ex as she’s on her rounds — “well, we’d better go before we get a ticket,” he smirks to his beautiful wife and child — L.A. meter maid Claire (the fabulous, surprising, dark beauty Samantha Morton, of 2002’s “Morvern Callar”) gets a more gentle tap from a hurtling car.

Struggling with sling and leg-cast, with her stroke-mute, wheelchair-scooting mother (Teri Garr, doing amazing work with neither lines nor blocking), she attempts to make the best of the upcoming holidays, stringing Christmas lights over picture frames (on horrible cornflower-sprigged wallpaper) and setting an unbalanced mini tree on the coffee table, where it falls over whenever someone breaths near it.

Returning to work, Claire is given an easier route, where she meets a co-worker, Jay (played by Jason Patric) a swaggering a-hole compensating for a ruined marriage, an estranged son and a destroyed career as a Berkeley-educated plasma physicist. And, in a most un-Hollywood way, he falls for her, against both the impulses that drive him to protect himself from heartbreak (an penchant for whores, his luxurious, leather one-person couch, the ability to ruin the days of carefree, sun-kissed shoppers who misjudged their quarters-to-minutes ratios) and the minutae of Claire’s life, the polar opposite of the things Jay thinks he is attracted to.

For instance, he surfs online porn on an iMac. She still has a dust cover on her old CRT monitor. Uncomfortable at the last minute by the spaghetti straps on the modest, burgundy dress she’s chosen for her office party, she wears a lacy white tanktop underneath it. For Christmas, Jay buys her a metallic, Barbie-pink bikini. And when we see her in it, she’s beautiful, even though she refreshingly lacks the space-age polymer flesh of All Women in Film.

As we watch Claire’s forgiving fuse burn and burn, Jay’s warring personalities — Prince Charming and wife-beater — explode in nearly every scene. He takes her to a deli, gets frustrated and barks at her to leave. She silently takes out her purse to pay for her coffee. He stops her: “Hold it, Sister Suffragette, I’m the man here.” Jay pushes Claire away, then pulls her arm around his shoulder. He insults her weight, then surprises her with a pound of M&Ms.

This is the kind of movie, and these are the kind of performances, that should get Oscars (and would, if the Academy Awards were more relevant than monkeys throwing darts).

First-time writer/director Cecilia Miniucchi has succeeded in making a great movie out subject material that in almost anyone else’s hands would have been condescending novelty or, worse, sexist cautionary tale. This could have been “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” with a sex scene. Tack a tongue-kiss or a flash of a wedding at the end, and it would be one of those romantic “comedies” where the naughty girl who chose a job instead of that nice man at the beginning shrugs, accepts the “I’m sorry” flower bouquests and puts her head down for 60 years of partner abuse.

Against worse odds than a coed playing Keno after ten Tahitian Tee-Hees, “Expired” locks down greatness. Its version of life is a sickly struggle, but at least it’s not the cancer of “happily ever after.”

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.