‘Bounce’ Has Familiar Script, Better Recipe

Stick an apple in a lunch pail, and you have a tasty part of your five-fruits-a-day. Toss that same apple in a pastry crust, and you have a tarte tatin, a dessert that is classy and sublime.

So it is with scripts. Take this story: Guy gives his airplane ticket to stranger. Plane crashes, guy meets stranger’s widow, falls in love with her and is afraid to reveal that he gave her husband the doomed ticket.

Match up that scenario with Jennie Garth, Steven Weber and a crank-‘em-out TV scribe, and you have the USA Network’s equivalent of that apple in the lunchbox.

Match it up with Kristin Scott-Thomas, Harrison Ford and a creaky Hollywood pro at the typewriter, and you have last year’s unwatchable “Random Hearts.” A rotting pile of apple cores, if you will.

Match it up with Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck and the clever, surprising screenwriter Don Roos (“The Opposite of Sex”), and you have a tarte tatin.

Much of the success of “Bounce” can be attributed to Paltrow, playing a woman who is incredibly appealing and incredibly unaware of her appeal. She makes her character quirky, endearing and poignant, particularly in a scene in a diner when she does something tiny, extraordinary and odd that I won’t give away. Roos has designed it to be one of those offhand details that make you fall in love with a character, and it’s a great movie moment.

“Bounce” is a drama, but it shares with “Opposite of Sex” a knowing, sly sense of humor and its laser-sharp dissection of human behavior in all its inexplicable oddness. What it doesn’t have is the right leading man. Affleck is likable, but that’s pretty much it. The movie is about his character, and Affleck isn’t up to the challenge.

He plays an advertising executive (the job the movies give soulless characters) whose name is Amaral (which is awfully close to Amoral). The movie is supposed to reveal how loving a quirky, endearing, poignant woman transforms him from zero to hero, but Affleck, who doesn’t have the depth to spelunk into this character’s dark soul, fails to show us the change.

That doesn’t cripple the movie. It’s still an intelligent, old-fashioned romantic weepie, but hovering over it is a sense that it could have been more.

This sidebar appeared with the story: “Bounce”

Locations: Newport Highway, River Park Square, Spokane Valley cinemas

Credits: Directed by Don Roos, starring Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow, Joe Morton, Natasha Henstridge, Tony Goldwyn, Jennifer Grey

Running time: 1:45

Rating: PG-13