Mixed Doubles

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Opposites attract. If we didn't believe that slightly dubious premise, our culture--not to mention our inner lives--would be infinitely poorer: no Wuthering Heights, no Bringing Up Baby. On the other hand, to be strictly fair, had we been spared that thought we would also have been spared Abie's Irish Rose and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? You win some, you lose some.

Right now in the realm of movie romance, we're on a major losing streak. For we live in a world where all the old dramatically and comedically interesting barriers to love's fulfillment have tumbled. Class, race, religion, all the things that used to keep a man and woman apart until the final reel--and even sometimes through eternity--have lost their potency. Or, to put the point a little more carefully, in a time when the very idea that society actually contains implacable opposites is--smokers and nonsmokers aside--officially discouraged, it's hard to think of anything that might give plausible pause to potential lovers.

You'd think maybe sexual preference might have some potential in this regard. Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright, obviously does. She's been trying to get an adaptation of Stephen McCauley's novel The Object of My Affection off the ground for something like a decade. It offers a gay guy named George (Paul Rudd) getting jilted, taking a room with a straight woman named Nina (Jennifer Aniston) and having them fall into, yes, affection. On her part, though, that develops into something a little more intense, especially when she contrasts his sweetness to the abrasiveness of her straight lover, Vince (John Pankow). Those feelings grow when she discovers that she's pregnant and that George is a much more supportive prenatal companion than Vince. Maybe, she thinks, he'd be a better father too. As for sex, well, as someone once said, nobody's perfect. And George does encouragingly tell her that he once had a not entirely disagreeable heterosexual affair.

It's a nice muddle, especially since Wasserstein provides the couple with all kinds of complications. She has rich, interfering relatives (Alan Alda and the divinely bitchy Allison Janney). He soon has a new gay flame (Amo Gulinello) whose worldly-wise longtime companion (wonderfully portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne) gets hurt as hard as Nina does. But it's also too much of a muddle. There is no logical way to arrange the kind of romantic reconciliation the writer, director (Nicholas Hytner) and we desperately want to enjoy. For neither Wasserstein nor Rudd quite wants to come to grips with the fact that George, despite his sweet smiles, is a careless, selfish man. Eliding the consequences of that problem, Wasserstein turns the whole bunch into an extended family--even adding a sweet-souled black policeman to the mix as Nina's consolation prize. Wasserstein can spritz New York-smart talk with the best of them, but she can't make us believe this mass conversion to sociopolitical correctness, with everybody loving and forgiving everybody despite the fact that the harms they have dealt one another remain essentially unresolved.

One of this movie's implications--and it's a common enough one these days--is that sensitivity is a quality impossible to find in straight guys. City of Angels takes that idea to the next logical plane: the celestial one. It suggests the only hope that Maggie Rice (Meg Ryan), a surgeon who is loveless as well as sleepless in Los Angeles, has for sympathetic understanding is not to be found in this world. Luckily for her, she has caught the eye of a sweetie-pie seraph named Seth (Nicolas Cage), an angel so eager for earthly pleasures--the taste of a pear, the touch of a woman--that he's willing, when he happens to spot the right girl, to give up angelic status, but not, of course, his angelic temperament, to sample them.

This premise, sans the feminist spin, was the basis of a very good movie, Wings of Desire, which City of Angels (as written by Dana Stevens and directed by Brad Silberling) travesties in the course of remaking. In the Wim Wenders-Peter Handke original of a decade ago, the object of their otherworldly hero's affection was not a neurotic overachiever, but a trapeze artist whose simplicity was what attracted him. More important, that movie did not intimate, as the new version does, that perfect love must of necessity be tragically brief. It proposed instead that a life of feeling was bound to be a messy business but that there was more fun to be found in the flux of things, grabbing what happiness you can, enduring what disappointments you must, than in pursuing an impossible ideal. This is not bad advice to the lovelorn of either sex.