"Wimbledon"

London hasn't been given the glamorous treatment in the movies much in recent years. Khondji gives the city its due. A sequence where Peter and Lizzie walk around London at night, and another where they take off for an impromptu seaside idyll, zipping along in Peter's MG convertible, has some of the cocktail-shaker sparkle you recall from the way movies depicted London in the '60s.

Perhaps "Wimbledon" was considered not slam-bang enough to be a summer release. Coming a week before the season ends, its sunny warm-weather look is a teasing reminder of the days about to slip away. That look is a big part of what makes "Wimbledon" such a slick, satisfying entertainment, as is the chemistry of Dunst and Bettany.

In "Spider-Man 2" Dunst seemed to be chafing against her role for no discernible reason; it was a grating performance. "Wimbledon" gives that spikiness an outlet. Dunst instinctively understands the comedy within the idea that someone as dimpled and sweet-looking as she is turns out to be an aggressive, unfazed-by-anything smartass. Dunst, flattening out her voice to achieve a tone of deadpan sarcasm, delivers little zingers with lemonade sunniness.

Dunst and Bettany turn the movie into a barbed love match between American wisecracking and British dry wit. She keeps tossing lines to Bettany to see if he can parry them, and to her delight, and ours, he does. The tension adds to the sexiness of their matchup. That tension goes pffft in the final shots, which have the feel of a studio-imposed add-on from the '40s. It's not enough to ruin the movie, though.

It was only a few years back that the movie model for English sexiness was Hugh Grant's floppy-haired stammering routine. Fortunately, for him and for us, Grant discovered he's a lot sexier and more appealing as a bastard ("Bridget Jones's Diary") or at least as a bit of a bastard ("About a Boy").

Paul Bettany's performance suggests that an English actor need no longer neuter himself to be a sexy romantic lead. There's one throwaway exchange in "Wimbledon" that may be the key to the performance. "Everybody loves a winner," says Peter's friend and workout partner (the charming Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), to which Peter replies, "Everybody but the British."

Part of the pressure that builds on Peter comes from the fact that no Englishman has won Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936. Several times in the movie Peter is tempted by how easy it would be just to give up, to stop playing through the pain, and to settle into the long-honored tradition of British failure.

We want to see Peter win, of course. The movie gets comic mileage out of the superstitions of athletes. But what cuts deeper is that Bettany doesn't filter out the fear or weariness from Peter's hunger to win. It's a recognizable, attractively human approach, and because Bettany plays Peter's moments of doubt with such casual aplomb, he's never in danger of appearing dithering or weedy. Movingly and without any sentimentality, Bettany gets at the profound sense of tiredness that can affect a still relatively young man when failure and disappointment start to eat away at his confidence.

"Wimbledon" is a sleek trifle, but Bettany gives it some weight. He shows us how hard Peter works to get where he does, and does it with wonderful ease. This is a star-making performance and, as with the character he plays, success looks good on Bettany.

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