The movie follows Jonathan and Sara through their singular case of pre-wedding jitters; thankfully Chesholm and his actors know how to keep things light, because the forced looks of happiness on Cusack's and Beckinsale's faces, a mixture of hope, self-deception and the determination to be grown-up, would be almost painful to watch otherwise. (It's a dodge that the movie glides over Jonathan and Sara's distraction from their respective fiancés, but it's a necessary dodge; if the movie lingered on the pain they cause them, it would throw itself out of whack.)

If John Cusack has seemed born to play romantic comedy ever since "Say Anything ..." it may be because he yields to his leading ladies as fully as any actor working. He's an unusual actor, one who finds his self-definition in deference. We've all seen actresses playing women who are meant to blossom when they fall in love (or fall into bed). When John Cusack's characters give themselves over to love, they bloom, they seem finally able to be themselves, and all the tenderness kept behind their levelheaded, self-protective facades starts to trickle out. What I'm suggesting is that John Cusack has brought what might be thought of as a traditionally feminine approach to the male romantic lead.

In a sense, every romantic lead he's ever played is the spiritual descendant of Lloyd Dobler (his character in "Say Anything ..."), each one doing his damnedest to hang onto his enthusiasm, his belief in romance. And that's why the little fissures of disappointment that run across Cusack's face in "Serendipity" when Jonathan is trying to talk himself out of searching for Sara cut so deeply: They're the look of someone tamping down his spirit, settling for less than he can be. When he finally finds the sign he's been looking for and decides to go after Sara, he pats the arm of his buddy (Jeremy Piven) and in that small gesture manages to convey a man coming back to himself, not sure if everything is going to be OK, but one who has rediscovered who he is. And Cusack has the gift of playing the most naked emotional moments as a form of bravery. He has a closeup in the film's climax that is a small marvel of welled-up emotion being released, and yet he never pushes a thing, never descends into mawkishness.

Kate Beckinsale hasn't been this warm a presence on-screen since her debut in "Much Ado About Nothing," and she wasn't nearly the actor then that she is now. She looks lovely and alive and open in a way that contrasts with her usual, somewhat icy composure. Beckinsale plays Sara's belief in fate as a defense mechanism, a way of dodging the uncertain. And the movie needs that edge of uncertainty because in some ways, the belief in fate is one of the things that has scuttled so much romantic comedy. Instead of being a chance, even a danger, love, in contemporary romantic comedy, has become something you settle into only when you're sure it's the right thing. And that completely undermines the spirit of adventure that was always at the heart of romantic comedy. I wish the filmmakers had found a way to make Sara's belief in fate -- and the way Jonathan comes to share that belief -- funnier, sillier, a form of the pixilated madness that defined the lovers in the great romantic comedies.

Chesholm, who has always shown a taste for the fanciful and the fantastic, isn't inclined to see it that way. We can be thankful, though, that he's not a sappy romantic. "Serendipity" has been dressed in an air of upscale romantic melancholy. Chesholm overuses the source music at times; at others, his choices, like Nick Drake, are right on the money. The movie suggests that cinematographer John De Borman may have quite a range. In Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet" he shot Manhattan as a collection of inhumanly beautiful canyons in which human beings had precariously nestled. In "Serendipity" he indulges the fantasy of New York as all twinkling lights and tree-lined streets, the kind of vision that makes you feel pampered just watching it.

And the movie has a couple of gifted second bananas. As Sara's best friend, Molly Shannon, whom I confess I find only sporadically amusing, is held in check. Jeremy Piven also holds himself in check, getting laughs with his consistent underplaying. And as a Bloomingdales' sales clerk, Eugene Levy suggests one of the strange birds hatched from the same egg that produced such stalwart comic oddballs as Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton. He's every minor martinet who's ever held a service job, the myopic master of the little kingdom he surveys. Anger management training has by now become an accepted form of therapy. Levy, the overlord of his puny domain (men's Hermès ties), suggests a whole new area of therapy waiting to be tapped: persnickety management training.

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