FORCES OF NATURE (49)

Directed by: Bronwen Hughes

Starring: Ben Affleck, Sandra Bullock, Maura Tierney

The Pitch: En route to his wedding, a strait-laced young man inadvertently hooks up with a free-spirited screwball, who turns his orderly life into a disaster area.

Theo Sez: Interesting : a message movie cleverly - though, you feel, inadvertently - disguised as a wacky comedy, PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES-style (dare we mention BRINGING UP BABY?). Affleck acts uptight - "My seat-belt is not functioning properly" - while Bullock does her uninhibited-kook thing, as per the title ; but the title is in the plural, and the film a tug-of-war between competing forces, freedom vs. the "delightful burden" of marriage. Its great strength is perhaps that it really could go either way (only when a character exclaims "This is so wrong!" about 20 minutes from the end - in a context I won't spoil for you here - did I know for sure where it was headed), though in truth the constant pressure on our hero to ditch his intended and run off with Sandra - he's forever bumping into people with horror stories of conjugal life, kicking off with "Yeah, I was married once..." followed by tales of boredom, infidelity, bad breath, body odour - makes the ending dramatically inevitable, at least in retrospect ; its great weakness is the grotesque over-direction, tilting the camera, throwing in bits of slo-mo and generally urging us to party down even as the script tries to reflect on Pleasure Vs. Responsibility. Hard to tell if it's meant to be a celebration or a cautionary tale - if Bullock represents the last temptation our hero must surmount or the bliss he could find if he wasn't so conventional - but you certainly feel it has something to say, or did before the shiny happy Hollywood machine got hold of it ; and "Against All Odds" will never sound the same again.