THE WAY SHE ISN'T

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Maybe we ought to just forget it--bury romantic comedy in the graveyard of genres dearly departed and move on. It was unquestionably the loveliest invention of the movies' golden age. But ours is not the golden age of anything--certainly not of romance or of high wit, surely not of that tolerant class consciousness that animated so many of those 1930s comedies. You know the old drill: rich boy meets poor girl (or vice versa), the disparities in their backgrounds--the very thing that first attracted them--sunders their romance until, defying convention, they get together at last. But in modern America, where the rich--nouveau spendthrifts aside--are careful not to act rich, and the poor think they're middle class, and therefore have no hesitation about aspiring above their stations, this plot doesn't work anymore. Instead, we have items like The Mirror Has Two Faces, where the thing keeping Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges) and Rose Morgan (Barbra Streisand) apart is, of all things, the celibate ideal.

No, they are not in religious orders; they're professors at secular Columbia. But they are caught in the grip of a really dumb idea. He thinks all his problems in life derive from his inability to stay out of the beds of sexually desirable but otherwise destructive women. He decides instead to form a companionate liaison with a woman who is his mental equal, but is otherwise--how to put this gently?--a bowwow. Rose, we are to understand, is so desperate that she goes along with him, thinking that once they're married his resistance to her will break down.

Richard LaGravenese is one of the few screenwriters left who can write smart dialogue for grownups to speak, but that skill only occasionally distracts from the desperation of his basic conceit. Bridges is a terrific actor, but, putting it mildly, he's miscast in the Doris Day role. And Streisand is a terrific presence, but also a performer who never forgets who she really is. Since she directed, co-produced and wrote Mirror's love theme, she is not about to let us forget it, either. "Second Hand Roses" have been part of her act, part of her calculations, for over 30 years, during which time we have learned that sooner or later the guy is going to respond to her inner light.

This glow is only half hidden under her shapeless clothes, half disguised by her boisterous enthusiasm for baseball, half explained by her relationship with an ego-flattening mom (Lauren Bacall, dripping comic venom in award-winning doses). In short, the fine feathers of a star we all know to be a strong, smart and sexy woman keep peeking through her ugly-duckling getup. This spoils whatever suspense this story might hold, and most of its humorous potential too. Unacknowledged vanity is ever the enemy of comedy. And, come to think of it, of romance as well.

--By Richard Schickel