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Opposites attract, except in this movie

By A. O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Aug 13, 2004, Page 20

PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX

In the opening title sequence of Laws of Attraction, little golden bubbles float upward to a satiny Champagne score (by Edward Shearmur), but the movie never makes good on this promise of effervescence. This is too bad, because the two principal actors in this watery romantic comedy, which opens nationwide today, make you wish it were better.

As Daniel Rafferty, a dashing divorce lawyer, Pierce Brosnan, with a hint of James Bond swagger, continues his run as a late-blooming, grown-up sex symbol. He is far more appealing in middle age than he was in his pseudo-Bond Remington Steele youth. And it is a relief to see Julianne Moore doing something onscreen besides suffer.

Her character, Audrey Woods, also a divorce lawyer, is at first so antiromantic that she refuses even to discuss the possibility of dating. Given Moore's attractiveness, this may seem wildly implausible -- in any case it is never explained -- unless it is a reaction to some of her recent roles. If you had endured the marital agonies of Far From Heaven, The Hours and Safe, you might be a little gun-shy, too.

PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX

But of course Audrey's tough shell exists only to be pierced, as it were, by Daniel's rascally charm. In time-honored screwball fashion, the script, by Aline Brosh McKenna and Robert Harling, casts its lovers as professional adversaries. They meet in court, spar and banter and double-cross (in front of a dour judge played by Nora Dunn) and then, before you know it, he sweeps her off her feet (and also, perhaps, vice versa).

PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX

And -- as we are not quite back in the winking, Rock Hudson-Doris Day era of the Production Code, which this picture occasionally evokes -- to bed they go after a drunken evening at an ethnic restaurant. (Audrey is one of those ultracosmopolitan Sex and the City Manhattan women who are freaked out by noisy Cuban restaurants, to say nothing of the streets of Chinatown, where Daniel keeps his disheveled office.)

When the two repeat this indiscretion after sampling the local moonshine at a rustic pub in Ireland, they wake up with wedding rings on their fingers, a development that nods playfully toward the old days, when, in the movies at least, one-night stands were unthinkable without benefit of clergy.

Film Notes Directed by: Peter Howitt Starring: Pierce Brosnan (Daniel Rafferty), Julianne Moore (Audrey Woods), Parker Posey (Serena), Michael Sheen (Thorne Jamison), Frances Fisher (Sara Miller) and Nora Dunn (Judge Abramovitz) Running time: 90 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

Unfortunately, in trying to update the naughty sparkle of the studio days to our own more

permissive but more anxious and less well-written times, Laws of Attraction, like the somewhat better Intolerable Cruelty, seems desperately unsure of itself at crucial moments.

The screenwriters and the director, Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors, Johnny English), appear to have no clue about how modern adults might feel or behave, and they are too timid to poke fun at any but the easiest targets. Parker Posey as a bratty fashion designer and Michael Sheen as her soon-to-be-ex-husband, a loutish British rock star, try valiantly to inject a bit of broad comic liveliness into the overly polite proceedings. But their characters are so stale and secondhand that they might have stepped out of a recent Woody Allen picture.

As Audrey's mother, Frances Fisher, a mere eight years older than Moore, fares a little better. The character is a serenely shallow plastic-surgery addict. ("The girls and I are having a lip party," she informs her appalled daughter.) But Fisher plays her with a smooth, unflappable dignity that reminds you of Agnes Moorehead.

Still, the efforts of the cast are not enough to lift Laws of Attraction above the cautious banality of a midseason replacement sitcom. The real problem is that despite game, charming performances from Brosnan and Moore, you never feel the urgency of Daniel and Audrey's rivalry or the attraction that springs from it.
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