THE AISLE SEAT - "THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION"

by Mike McGranaghan

The Object of My Affection is a movie filled with good intentions. In addition to being a romantic comedy/drama, it also wants to be a movie about the changing face of family values. The story takes great pains to remind us that people of all sexual orientations need (and want) to be part of a family. It's a nice message caught in a movie that never quite pulls off the sentiment it tries to. For all its good intentions, watching The Object of My Affection is a strangely unemotional experience.

Jennifer Aniston stars as Nina, a young social worker who lives in New York City. She has a boyfriend, Vince (Mad About You's John Pankow) who is kind of a jerk. Nina believes in the joy of life, but her stepsister and the woman's husband (Alan Alda) run in an elite social circle and enjoy flaunting it. At one of their swanky parties, Nina meets George (Paul Rudd from Clueless), a gay elementary school teacher whose lover (Tim Daly) has just given him the boot. George needs a place to stay for a while, and Nina has a spare bedroom, so the two become unlikely roommates.

Initially it seems like the perfect arrangement, but as they grow closer, Nina starts to change. Her life becomes more focused on George and less focused on Vince; when she finds out she's pregnant with Vince's child, she decides her life is on the wrong track and breaks up with him, deciding that she and George will constitute the baby's family. Nina also realizes that she's falling in love with her roommate ("Vince doesn't feel like home to me," she tells George. "You do."). Although George wants to be part of a family, he is gay and not able to love Nina in the same way, which sends her into a fit of denial.

Unrequited love is one of the most powerful subjects a film can deal with. The Object of My Affection, however, doesn't create a whole lot of emotion for the audience. The movie keeps its subject matter at arms' length, never giving the topic much substance. Watching it, I was reminded of two other recent pictures. The obvious comparison is to last year's Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith's raucous boy-loves-lesbian story. But I also thought of the current City of Angels. Those films depict difficult, tenuous relationships with more energy and passion than this one; you can feel the danger as well as the excitement in those couples. George and Nina, meanwhile, seem too cautious to ever put much on the line emotionally. Although Aniston and Rudd give solid performances, the bond between their characters is never totally believable.

The other characters fare even worse. Every single supporting character is painfully stereotypical. You have the shrewish stepsister, the smart-alec child, George's old boyfriend (who cheats but then comes crawling back later on), and the nosy downstairs neighbor (who opens the window and yells at everyone who rings the bell). Then there's Alan Alda, who seems really out of place as he walks around spouting non sequiturs left and right. I'm not sure why his character is even in the film. Perhaps worst of all is the character Vince, who behaves only according to the contrivances of the plot. When it needs him to be hateful, he's hateful; when it needs him to be a "sweet guy down deep," he's a sweet guy down deep.

It's a shame that these characters are so annoying, because - although George and Nina are sometimes a bit bland - Aniston and Rudd are both very good here. They struggle against a weak script (by playwright Wendy Wasserstein) to put some heart into the film. At times, they rise so far above the material that you can see a great movie lurking somewhere inside this pleasant-but-misconceived one. Aniston is almost unbeatable when it comes to comic vulnerability, and Rudd has a quiet intelligence. Both actors are nicely cast.

The Object of My Affection would have been better if it had trusted the likability of its two stars more. Instead, it feels the need to undercut its own plot with misplaced humor straight out of a bad sitcom. Take, for instance, this scene, set at Thanksgiving: Vince accuses George of hitting on Nina, George refutes this by shouting to a room full of people that he's gay, a surprised little girl yells "you are?" and Alda stumbles around the room with a sudden case of food poisoning, mumbling incoherently about how homosexuality is "a valid and wonderful lifestyle choice." Meanwhile, the lady downstairs stands in the stairway hollering about who-knows-what. Any sense of reality or audience identification is destroyed by the lunacy.

You may be getting the impression that The Object of My Affection is a bad movie; it is not. As I said, I enjoyed the two lead performers a great deal, and some of the individual scenes work nicely. I also liked the superb supporting performance from Nigel Hawthorne, as a gay drama critic who offers Nina an important bit of advice. These things work, and they make the film interestingly watchable. They also make you realize that The Object of My Affection wasted a lot of potential to be a great heartbreaker of a movie.

( 1/2 out of four)