Fetal

By RICHARD CORLISS

IMMEDIATE FAMILY Directed by Jonathan Kaplan

Screenplay by Barbara Benedek

The Spectors' car swerves to avoid a boy who has darted out into the road, and nice Michael (James Woods) mutters to his nice wife Linda (Glenn Close), "Some people should not be allowed to have children!" He is voicing a common belief that those who are having the most kids can't raise them, and those who can afford kids aren't having them. O.K. then. Who should raise the first generation of 21st century teenagers? The healthy, efficient yuppies, who just might be able to fit a child into their Filofax schedules? Or the chain-smoking unmarrieds of the underclass, with lives of noisy desperation awaiting them like so many episodes of Married . . . With Children? In a society where childless can still be a near synonym for lifeless, are the "wrong" people having too many kids? Are there any right parents?

Immediate Family touches all these bases lightly, like a gazelle on a home- run trot. Openhearted and canny, the film offers few answers, takes no sides. It paints the yups, Linda and Michael, as decent, attractive people. Their friends' kids may run wild in a toddler road show of Lord of the Flies, but the Spectors seem ideal parents-to-be. Yet they can't be biological parents. Every month Linda says, "I spend two weeks whacked out on fertility drugs, two weeks depressed that they don't work." In the bathroom, Michael opens a specimen jar, picks up a well-thumbed copy of Penthouse and sighs. There is no joy in their rituals, only emptiness and failure. Time to adopt a baby.

Lucy Moore (Mary Stuart Masterson) has a baby, or will in a few weeks. In the modern fashion of adoption, the Spectors spend time getting to know her. And to like her -- Lucy has a lot to like. A blossom growing out of white trash, she teeters between unaffected adolescence and poignant maturity. But perhaps the Spectors are also rehearsing for parenthood; perhaps they are determined to send sweet signals across the barriers of culture, class and age. They realize that their ability to adopt her baby depends finally on Lucy's whim. So, effectively, they adopt Lucy. She is an '80s Eliza Doolittle in the Spectors' pristine palace, getting a tantalizing glimpse of the good life on loan. Should her child live there? She's not sure. Could she live there? In a minute. Forever.

Despite its customized carpeting of a soft-rock score, Immediate Family isn't exactly sentimental. It's a fond diagnosis of sentiment, which director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel, The Accused) observes with his usual handsome care. Close and Woods, more familiar playing high-powered candidates for psychosis, are laser-precise as the Spectors. They work hard at appearing comfortable in roles without edges. But the Spectors, who set the film's agenda, cede sympathy to Lucy, as the well-to-do in movies inevitably do to the poor-but-spunky.

The film's admirable trick is to shift the balance without opting for heroes and villains. Kevin Dillon, as Lucy's boyfriend, lists toward the loutish, but he's no jerk. And Masterson's fine, grace-noted performance is like the film: full of wit, skepticism and hope for compromises that won't ruin lives. This is a serious comedy that locates wry smiles in everyone's burdens and opportunities. The tears come at the end.