"Bounce"

The director of "The Opposite of Sex" returns with a romance featuring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck. Who could have predicted the mess that results?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Nov 17, 2000 | It sure looked like director Don Roos, for his second film, was getting the kind of opportunity every indie filmmaker not so secretly craves. His enjoyable debut, "The Opposite of Sex," established him as a hip but not quite dangerous alternative force in movieland; for the follow-up, he had Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow -- two of Hollywood's most bankable young stars -- signed up for a contemporary love story. Surely these were the keys to the kingdom. Art and money should have joined in harmonic convergence, followed by glowing reviews and fistfuls of awards. Think "American Beauty" crossbred with "Love Story," or "The Way We Were" for a generation scarred by irony.

Instead, "Bounce" is a pallid, mediocre tale that treacles its way through well-worn channels. Its story -- a plane-crash widow is romanced by the recovering sleazeball who believes himself responsible for her husband's death -- is outlandish without being entertaining. The humor and insouciant 'tude of "The Opposite of Sex," in fact, have vanished, and this deadeningly predictable movie seems to have been directed by the same software program or infobot that creates most Hollywood romances. There are a few intriguing glimmers of character and drama early on, but these are just flashes of lucidity during the film's long slide into a lovelorn stupor.

If anything, this movie exposes how bland and conformist American filmmaking remains despite all the rhetoric about how independent productions have transformed the business. When you insert stars of Affleck and Paltrow's magnitude, some sort of default mode kicks in, and all movies revert to the path of maximum safety and least resistance. Even a writer and director with Roos' evident talents (his mixed screenwriting record also includes "Boys on the Side" and "Single White Female") becomes unable to escape the swamps of formulaic goo. Despite the understandable appeal of Paltrow's radiant complexion and Affleck's impressive chest, I can't imagine audiences will find much fun here.

To some extent, the failure of "Bounce" may boil down to pheromones. Both of these appealing actors do the things they do: Affleck plays a bluff, self-important guy trying to make contact with his decent core, while Paltrow virtually radiates emotion, unable to keep her heart and soul concealed beneath her adult surface. But to my taste, they don't sync up. They're just not right for each other. I fretted for both of them, in a way that didn't serve the movie well. Buddy (Affleck) is a womanizing, Armani-clad ad executive; he's supposed to be a shallow creep who is transformed by his relationship with Abby (Paltrow), but his repentance strikes me as dubious and temporary. Widowed, intense Abby is exactly the kind of wounded bird that guys like Buddy torture without meaning to. I imagine them in the future, stuck in an Ingmar Bergman-esque marriage full of locked bathroom doors, incoherent blubbering and overnight disappearances.

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