FOOLS FOR LOVE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Mr. Fitzpatrick (John Mahoney) is a retired New York City fireman who has lost faith in God but doesn't believe that prevents him from remaining a good Catholic. His wife (whom we never see) is having an affair with the man at the hardware store. Their elder son Mickey (played by writer-director Edward Burns) is a cabbie who marries one of his fares (Maxine Bahns) 24 hours after she hails his hack. The younger, Francis (Mike McGlone), is a master of the Wall Street universe, but not of life beyond it. He claims to be too preoccupied to have sex with his wife (Jennifer Aniston), but he's lying. He is trying to remain faithful to his mistress (Cameron Diaz), who just happens to be his brother's former fiance.

Sounds like an old-fashioned French farce, doesn't it?--all intricate coincidence, mislaid innocence and misplaced passion. But She's the One has something more on its mind than extending the privileges of upper-class sexual idiocy to people of--or newly emerged from--the contemporary American working class. For all the wildness of his plotting, Burns, expanding the territory he opened up in The Brothers McMullen, is at heart a realist of an interesting kind--cool, nonjudgmental, even genial. He is also a confident subversive, gnawing away at the notion, currently so popular in political circles, that average Americans, holding to traditional values, bulwark us against the virus of postmodern moral ambiguity. What he's saying in this marvelously dry, sly movie is that it's epidemic...and irresistible.

--By Richard Schickel