THE TRUTH ABOUT CATS AND DOGS (49)

Directed by: Michael Lehmann

Starring: Janeane Garofalo, Uma Thurman, Ben Chaplin

The Pitch: A radio pet-doctor - warm, intelligent but a little on the dumpy side - lies to a listener about her looks, then enlists her beautiful-but-dumb neighbour to impersonate her when he comes calling.

Theo Sez: Sexist Generalisation #563 : men like mechanical, clearly-defined stuff, and would probably choose farce if asked for their favourite type of comedy ; women prefer woozy, discursive stuff, and would probably choose a character-driven comedy about relationships. A bit like this one actually, written by a woman and featuring surprisingly few of the escalating plot twists and mistaken-identity hysteria you might expect given the premise : its complications are more about the ebb and flow of feelings, people falling in and out of love - the point isn't so much how our heroine can conceal an increasingly tangled web of lies as how she can become psychologically ready to admit the truth. Unfortunately, the willingness to probe emotions - and to show up our society's pernicious emphasis on the Beauty myth - doesn't make the plot any less artificial, or the rash of cute-doggy shots any less gratingly manipulative. Garofalo's luminous performance apart, I found the result amusing but hollow, a sitcom-superficial movie straining for soulfulness ; then again, I'm probably the wrong sex.