"Serendipity"

Airy and enchanting, this romantic comedy works overtime to sprinkle moonlight and stardust over itself.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 5, 2001 | Ever since Sept. 11, critics and pundits have been predicting that moviegoers will be craving something light and entertaining, something to fulfill the movies' function of providing an escape. So it's nice to be able to recommend a picture that fits the bill and is good besides.

The romantic fantasy "Serendipity" works overtime to sprinkle moonlight and stardust over itself. You can feel just how hard the director Peter Chesholm ("The Mighty," "Hear My Song") and the screenwriter Marc Klein have worked to make the movie airy and enchanting. If you've ever been lucky enough to chance upon a really spectacular view of the New York skyline at dusk, when the lights of the city have come on and everything looks shiny and promising, you know the romantic wistfulness the movie is striving to conjure up.

It's a matter of luck in the movies, too. "Serendipity" may be calculated, but the good news is that all that hard work never prevents it from being genuinely charming. Luckily, it does prevent it from going goopy. And in the leads, John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale lend the picture a movie-star allure that's fully in the service of the mood. They're both so polished that, were they older, it would be possible to speak of their performances as the work of old pros.

The movie kicks off at Christmastime in Bloomingdale's, as spiffy and harried a setting for the beginning of a romantic comedy as any. Jonathan (Cusack) and Sara (Beckinsale) both have their eyes on the store's last pair of black cashmere gloves. Jonathan gallantly allows Sara to purchase them; because they've had a "moment," the two wind up spending the evening together, going for ice cream, ice skating in Central Park and talking, talking, talking. They're each involved with someone else, but obviously they're smitten with each other. Sara finally succumbs to Jonathan's argument that she should give him her phone number, but a gust of wind whips it out of his hand, and because she believes life is ruled by fate, she takes it as a sign that they aren't meant to be together.

But she offers him -- and the fates -- a compromise: writing her name and number in a copy of Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" (another felicitous choice in establishing a romantic mood -- apart from being a great book, it's a steamy read). She tells him she plans to sell it at a used-book store the next morning and that if they're meant to be together, he'll find it.

With that premise, "Serendipity" sets itself a huge obstacle to overcome. How do you make a romantic comedy where the lovers are apart for most of the movie? In some way that trend (also used in the antiichrist of romantic comedies, "Sleepless in Seattle") is a sign of the cozy emotional safety that romantic comedies are now selling. Instead of throwing the lovers together where they will squabble and coo and meet the challenges circumstance puts in their way -- the template that has always provided the meat and the emotional grounding of the genre -- keeping them apart allows them to regard each other in a state of dreamy romanticized perfection. And the fade-out comes with the hard work of staying together yet to be faced.

"Serendipity" maneuvers deftly around that problem. Cusack and Beckinsale click so well in the long opening sequence that -- in some way -- finding their way back to each other becomes the big obstacle in their relationship. Klein and Chesholm provide all sorts of twinkly little coincidences and near meetings that are designed to show us that the would-be lovers are, though separated, right in synch with each other. But the real work is done by Cusack and Beckinsale, as they play two people attempting to convince themselves that, in not winding up with each other, they haven't settled for less. After their initial encounter, the movie leaps ahead a couple of years to find each of them engaged to someone else, Jonathan to a sweet, pretty, unexciting girl (Bridget Moynahan) and Sara to a shambling, self-absorbed galoot of a musician (John Corbett, Aidan from "Sex and the City"), who plays a godawful strain of Middle Eastern cum New Age slop.

Next Page: John Cusack -- an actor who yields to his leading ladies

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