Friday, 04/22/05

A lot like 'When Harry Met Sally'

Ashton Kutcher is an easy target. He's pretty. He's popular. He has a hit TV series and a hot girlfriend (Demi Moore) who might be more than that, if you track the tabloid pregnancy rumors.

The Dude, Where's My Car? star's previous attempt at being taken seriously — last year's The Butterfly Effect — was met with nearly universal critical derision.

But Kutcher should silence the cynics in A Lot Like Love.

He shows unexpected depth and range as the slightly nerdy half of a star-crossed When Harry Met Sally-style duo, opposite the lovely, slightly bohemian Amanda Peet.

(And if you're going to be pilfering material from others, one of Rob Reiner's best movies is certainly a worthwhile source.)

The TV commercials for A Lot Like Love — in which Peet and Kutcher spit water at each other and shove things up their noses — make it look like a wacky, gross-out romp. While the two do have a goofy playfulness, their relationship is surprisingly warm and sweet.

Kutcher has a stillness about him we've never seen before, considering he's made his name with a jittery brand of comedy, and he effectively uses the softness of his brown eyes to express vulnerability. Even his voice sounds different — it's deeper, more low-key.

Peet, meanwhile, steps easily into the leading-lady role after years of supporting parts in movies such as The Whole Nine Yards and Something's Gotta Give, and has an effortlessly sexy energy.

Their characters, Oliver and Emily, repeatedly meet each other over a seven-year period and form an easy, comfortable friendship that morphs into an amorphous romance. They're always in other cities and involved with other people but, of course, they're destined to be together, although on paper they seem totally wrong for each other. When they first meet in the mid-'90s, he's fresh out of college and concerned about getting ''his ducks in a row'' — job, car, house, wife. She's fresh out of a rock band and seemingly aimless.

A few years after hooking up on a cross-country flight and walking around New York City together, Oliver ends up forming an online diaper delivery service with a friend (Kal Penn) in San Francisco. Emily, back in Los Angeles, tries be an actress and finds she has a talent for photography.

They could have been sitcom opposites like Dharma & Greg, but director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) and screenwriter Colin Patrick Lynch (in his first script to make it to the screen) never turn them into easy types. It's also refreshing to watch them spend time together without neurotically analyzing what they mean to each other. They just . . . are.

But this is a romantic comedy, so inevitably you have some conventional trappings of the genre — including the unfortunately nondescript title. As in When Harry Met Sally . . ., there's a crucial New Year's Eve party. There are the obligatory meddlesome friends (played by Kathryn Hahn and Ali Larter). And the film climaxes at a wedding, complete with misunderstandings.

Oliver awkwardly serenades Emily in hopes of winning her heart — with Bon Jovi's I'll Be There for You, a great '80s high-school make-out ballad — but again, that's a scene in the commercials that's played for big laughs.

It's actually a poignant moment, much more so than a similar one Kutcher played out in the recent Guess Who, in which he nervously warbled Lou Rawls' You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine.

And it's just another wonderful surprise in a movie that's full of them.