BEAUTIFUL GIRLS (38)

Directed by: Ted Demme

Starring: Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Michael Rapaport, Natalie Portman

The Pitch: Romantic problems and dilemmas for a group of twentysomething friends in a small town, on the eve of their high-school reunion.

Theo Sez: Writer Scott Rosenberg's peculiarly brittle brand of banter - smooth but anal-retentive, tying everything up neatly, as if penned by a rather prissy book-keeper after a Creative Writing course - gets a real showcase in this attempt at a twentysomething NOBODY'S FOOL. All the characters speak the same way and they banter constantly, mostly about relationships but also during relationships - not just when they flirt but also when they're necking in a car ("Don't you want to slip into something more comfortable?" "Like what?" "Like me"), and even while actually making love, as if trading wisecracks were a physical part of sex. There's also a couple of rants (one for each sex, neatly enough) on the subject of supermodels and artificially "beautiful girls", with which one of the characters is obsessed - and the film's point seems to be that he, like his friends, needs to grow up and stop dreaming, which is a bit rich considering that it's spent most of the preceding hour-and-a-half wallowing in their goofy bull-sessions. It's basically a phony film, humane on top, glib and conventional underneath. The only strand that genuinely seems concerned with characters instead of surfaces is Hutton's friendship with (cum crush on) a 13-year-old girl - and even that's mostly because the actors, especially Portman in the film's finest performance, bring to it the one thing that cannot be painstakingly written (because it only works when it's effortless): charm.