Altar Egos

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Maggie (Julia Roberts) runs a small-town hardware store. But she's more famous for leaving her bridegrooms at the altar. Ike (Richard Gere) is a newspaper columnist who writes a piece exaggerating her escapist exploits in terms sexist enough to get him fired. Are these people meant for each other or what?

Sure. Especially since they are the best-looking people on display in Runaway Bride, a movie that takes its good-natured time explaining Maggie's curious behavior and balancing it against Ike's less obvious failures (he has an intimacy problem, naturally). That time is for the most part cheerfully spent, however, as he arrives in town hoping to witness her bolt from the altar for a fourth time.

She does. But you can guess who the (temporary) victim is this time, can't you? And maybe you can guess--this question is a little harder--why the bride keeps running away. She renounces her needs in order to fit her current man's ideal. The script by Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott makes these jilted guys plausibly awful, so we agree with Maggie's decisions to dump them.

Why she waits until the last minute is another matter, but that's the conceit director Garry Marshall obliges us to accept, and it's no more strained than the premise Roberts and Gere worked so successfully for him in Pretty Woman. They're all good at diversionary sleight-of-hand. Roberts' tentativeness is charming; she knows what she's doing, fights it, then succumbs with sad but perky resignation. Gere puts a nice flaky edge on his incisiveness. The supporting cast, led by Joan Cusack, surrounds them with funny common sense that doesn't fully assert itself until the happy end of this deft, if disposable, movie.

--By Richard Schickel