SERENDIPITY Rated PG-13, 85 minutes Directed by Peter Chelsom WHEN, WHERE Now playing at the UA De Vargas
Serendipity is a popular ice cream parlor on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It's a nice place to get a sweet syrupy confection, and so is the movie to which it lends its name, although the latter's labored contrivances come close to pushing it over the edge, or driving us over the edge, whichever comes first. What keeps the movie palatable is the irresistibility of its two leads, John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, and the siren appeal of New York City at its most winsomely romantic, a city caught inside a sparkling snow globe.
Jonathan (Cusack) and Sara (Beckinsale, with her real accent) meet over a pair of cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale's in the Christmas rush. It's love at first sight -- but Sara is more of a believer in second sight, and other mystical phenomena. They spend a magical Manhattan evening together, eating ice cream, making witty small talk, riding the elevator at the Waldorf Astoria, ice skating in Central Park, and tracing on her freckles the heavenly outline of Cassiopeia, "who made one tragic mistake, and paid for eternity." But they both have romantic entanglements, and she won't give him her name or phone number. She does, however, write them in a copy of a novel which she sells to a used bookstore. She has him write his on a $5 bill, which she immediately spends. If fate brings these items back into their possession, they'll know they were meant to be together. (The novel is Love in the Time of Cholera, which is about as close as the movie comes to acknowledging that there may be a dark underbelly to this world.)
Time passes. You know time has passed, because you get clocks spinning their hands, sundials sweeping their shadows, and then, just in case you didn't get it, the words "A few years later" superimposed on the screen.
Jon's about to be married to Halley (Bridget Moynahan). She's a lovely girl, bur she isn't Kate Beckinsale. Sara's moved to the other coast, where she's about to be married to Lars (John Corbett). He's a New Age musician, which is all the information you need about that. Before taking the final plunge into sparkless matrimony, they each decide to make one last whirlwind try at finding that lost perfect love.
Each is accompanied in this quest by a Faithful Friend. Jon's is his best buddy Dean (Jeremy Piven, Cusack's real-life sidekick), an obit writer at the New York Times (another acknowledgement of life's tragic side.) Piven is very funny, especially in his rehearsal dinner toast. Less successful is SNL's Molly Shannon as Sara's pal Eve, who owns a San Francisco New Age shop but doesn't believe that sappy mystical stuff. Neither, by this time, does Sara, and small wonder, seeing where that sort of thing has gotten her in the past. The movie uses these friendships to make several coy allusions to homosexuality, but there's neither substance or purpose to them.
There are some wonderful scenes. One of the best showcases Eugene Levy as a devious martinet of a Bloomingdale's salesman. But more and more, as the story doubles back and forth across its paths of near-miss and extravagant coincidence, the bubbly charm of the earlier scenes give way to the tortured tyrannies of plot, until the characters seem to be racing from place to place at the demands of the script and the director rather than in response to any inner voice of their own. And as the movie whirls to its inevitable conclusion, it dodges its responsibilities in dealing with the messiness that comes with the disposing of pleasant characters who have become no longer necessary. (It also disposes discreetly of those awkward reminders of unpleasantness on the New York skyline, the twin towers of the World Trade Center.)
"Serendipity" is a romantic comedy, and there's no reason why it should have to deal with anything it doesn't want to, as long as the romance is romantic and the comedy is comic. Screwball comedy thrived as a distraction to the Great Depression, romantic comedy helped us through WWII, and there's probably enough of what it takes in this slight but sweet indulgence to pry us away from CNN and take us out of ourselves for an hour and a half of easy watching. It's predictable, and it's exasperating, but it's pretty inoffensive. "Serendipity" is "An Affair to Remember" without the accident and the wheelchair, and with a lot more laughs.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29763 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 254059 X-RT-TitleID: 1110303 X-RT-SourceID: 896 X-RT-AuthorID: 2779
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews