IN A WAY, EXTRAORDINARY

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The great thing about A Life Less Ordinary is its reckless lack of cultural calculation. In an age ruled by the demographic imperative, it is bound to confuse, if not actually offend, its natural constituencies--nostalgic oldsters, transgressive youngsters--who are antithetical in the first place. Nor in its weirdness does it offer anything but befuddlement for the general movie audience out for a good, conventionally generic time.

Its very title is mystifying. It seems to belong on a memoir by a minor, faintly boring old poet. It perches rather uneasily atop a story in which Robert, a sweet, dim maintenance man (a woofly Ewan McGregor), replaced by a robot, decides to revenge himself on his rich, cruel boss (Ian Holm) by kidnapping the boss's daughter Celine (a sleek Cameron Diaz). She, naturally, turns out to be spoiled, smart, willful and eager to collaborate in ripping off Daddy.

O.K., you say, at heart it's a romantic comedy, It Happened One Night with an edge. Not so fast. You haven't taken the angels into account. They're ferociously played by diminutive Holly Hunter and massive Delroy Lindo, and Gabriel (Dan Hedaya) has sent them back to Earth to bring these crazy kids together. If these dysfunctionals can be made to function in harmony, there is hope, he thinks, for a world riven by romantic discord. Well, why not? A little dollop of Here Comes Mr. Jordan or Stairway to Heaven never hurt anyone--except that these seraphs have a mean streak unknown to their more beamish movie predecessors.

For they are, after all, creations of the filmmaking team--director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald--who gave us Trainspotting and Shallow Grave and who have yet to make a movie that is less than extraordinary, stylistically speaking. Boyle is a director who has never encountered a radical angle he doesn't like, a dislocating cut between two of them that doesn't capture his fancy, an eccentric minor character he won't encourage to subvert a cliche.

He and Hodge also have nice taste in dream sequences. There's nothing here that quite equals McGregor's dive down the toilet in Trainspotting, but there's a dance number, to the antique strains of Beyond the Sea, that begins in a karaoke bar and ends in a romantic delirium that's just wonderful. And not at all the sort of thing you'd expect to arise out of the sere Utah landscape where the fugitives have taken refuge from Celine's implacably pursuing pop.

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting. Somehow, though, one wishes A Life Less Ordinary well as it bops chipperly along a road less traveled.

--By Richard Schickel