08/01/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Picture Perfect
It's not perfect, but it's a fun ride

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*** (out of five)
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Bacon, Jay Mohr, Illeana Douglas, Olympia Dukakis, Kevin Dunn. A 20th Century Fox picture written by Glenn Gordon Caron, Arleen Sorkin and Paul Slansky, directed by Caron. Rated PG-13, contains sexual situations, profanity. Running time: 104 minutes.

There are two weddings, but no funeral in Picture Perfect, a breezy little romantic comedy about a woman who invents a big romance with a casual acquaintance, then discovers that he's falling in love with her.

Jennifer Aniston is Kate Mosley, who promotes the idea of being engaged to a man who lives 200 miles away in order to push herself forward in the non-forward-thinking Manhattan advertising agency she works for . . . and also to create a little forward momentum in the man with whom she is falling in love.

It sounds preposterous that her boss would want her to be tied down before giving her a well-deserved promotion. Yet this is a sort of '90s Cinderella fantasy and it's played lightly enough that you go along for the ride. It was directed and co-written in bubbly style by Glenn Gordon Caron, who was behind the same sort of breezy sexual sparring that made Moonlighting such a TV hit.

Aniston is the latest Friends cast member to try for the big-screen stardom that has so far eluded them (save for Courteney Cox in the horror film Scream, though that film's success didn't have much to do with Cox). I'm not sure that Picture Perfect will turn Aniston into a movie star, although she does show promise.

It's a little too TV-sitcom pat, for one thing. A lot of it revolves around Kate landing a big account for a real-life mustard company, and so the many shots of mustard jars and even of people wearing huge mustard jars at a promotional party makes you feel as though you're watching a commercial.

People who have seen the movie's trailer have already gotten the plot's basic premise, and the film doesn't expand beyond that idea much. It feels like a remake of a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie from the early '60s, only with (mostly offscreen) sex.

Yet Aniston has a very easy naturalness to her style that makes Kate winning. And Mohr, who was a standout as Tom Cruise's pushy rival agent in Jerry Maguire, is wonderful as the totally innocent, naive, unselfconscious Nick, who is perfectly happy to spend his life videotaping weddings and bar mitzvahs. He's refreshing and sweet and it's easy to see how a mutual attraction could develop between him and Kate, especially since his rival is played by the ickily slick Kevin Bacon, whose smile always seems to be hiding an ulterior motive.

Nick is such a nice guy that when he reluctantly agrees to Kate's plan to engineer a split in front of her boss at a posh restaurant so that she will be free, you want to shout "Say it isn't so."

It isn't, at least not permanently. This is the old boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl formula, and Caron doesn't tinker with it much. That leaves him with a formula picture that's far from perfect, although one that has enough snappy lines to make you laugh out loud far more than once.

Olympia Dukakis scores as Kate's guilt-inducing mother. So does Illeana Douglas as the co-worker friend who cooks up the fake engagement in the first place. And Aniston even manages to make fun of her most famous feature -- her hair.

Early in the film she's in pigtails. Later, however, there's a funny scene in which she wears enormous rollers in order to get that patented hair-in-her-eyes look. She seems to be game for anything.