Smile Like Yours, A (1997)

reviewed by
Scott Renshaw


A SMILE LIKE YOURS (Paramount) Starring: Greg Kinnear, Lauren Holly, Joan Cusack, Jay Thomas, Jill Hennessy, Christopher McDonald. Screenplay: Kevin Meyer and Keith Samples. Producers: David Kirkpatrick and Tony Amatullo. Director: Keith Samples. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, sexual situations, profanity) Running Time: 95 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

A plot synopsis for A SMILE LIKE YOURS reads like the most generic of bittersweet romantic comedies. Danny (Greg Kinnear) and Jennifer Robertson (Lauren Holly) are a happily married young San Francisco couple with a bright future, until Jennifer decides that it's time for baby to make three. Attempts at conception put a damper on their once-vibrant sex life; little white lies develop into larger deceptions. Danny begins to suspect Jennifer of cheating with a cosmetics executive (Christopher McDonald), while Jennifer similarly suspects Danny of cheating with a gorgeous architect (Jill Hennessy). Eventually, tensions cause a genuine rift between the two. Sounds quite a bit like SHE'S HAVING A BABY, doesn't it?

Only it's more like SHE'S _NOT_ HAVING A BABY, because A SMILE LIKE YOURS is a bittersweet romantic comedy about infertility. That's right, all the wacky hijinks of masturbating into a cup! All the side-splitting humor of spending an hour in stirrups! All the unbridled hilarity of small-talk with another pair of clinic patients who reveal their history with gonorrhea and pelvic inflammatory disease!

I can understand the temptation to search for humor in a subject as frustrating, embarrassing and occasionally guilt-inducing as fertility problems. Perhaps either writer/director Keith Samples or his co-writer Kevin Meyer had some personal experience in this area, and felt the need to share their quest for a smile amidst the tears. And it might have worked if they had bothered to include a single honest moment in A SMILE LIKE YOURS. There is no attempt to understand how Danny and Jennifer really feel about their dilemma, no sense of any genuine pain. Samples and Meyer have merely grafted a few scenes at a fertility clinic onto a fluffy and absurdly predictable relationship comedy, forcing you to wonder why it couldn't just as easily have been about a couple struggling with financial problems, or an irritating relative, or the heartbreak of psoriasis.

It's actually fairly impressive how generic and predictable A SMILE LIKE YOURS turns out to be. The casting certainly doesn't help matters, offering the mundanely attractive Kinnear and Holly as our protagonists without once stepping inside their heads (we never learn why Jennifer is so underhanded about trying to get pregnant, considering Danny seems perfectly comfortable with the idea). Even the supporting cast -- Jay Thomas as the acerbic guy pal, Joan Cusack as the daffy gal pal -- appears to have been generated by a computer program. The film is so ennervated for so long that a late cameo by Shirley MacLaine provides virtually the entire energy quotient in three minutes of screen time. For an hour and a half A SMILE LIKE YOURS trudges in the most obvious directions, reaching a grating climax in a scene where several agonizing seconds pass between the moment we _know_ Jennifer is going to call Danny's hotel room and find another woman there, and the moment the phone actually rings.

Infertility may be a delicate issue, but it's hardly sacrosanct. A competent film-making team might have made either an exaggerated black comedy or a more sensitive comedy-drama about the issue. It deserves much better than to become an afterthought in a story which has nothing creative or insightful to offer on any subject. You know you're in trouble when the biggest laugh in a film comes during a scene when a character is watching a rerun of "I Love Lucy"...and the laugh is actually _at_ the rerun of "I Love Lucy." Lucy is still funnier -- and more inventive -- after 40 years than A SMILE LIKE YOURS is after 40 minutes.

     On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 high concept-ions:  2.

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