Sweet Nothings

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: MADE IN AMERICA

DIRECTOR: RICHARD BENJAMIN

WRITER: HOLLY GOLDBERG SLOAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: An easygoing mainstream comedy solves contemporary racial and sexual issues too comfortably.

She's a celibate single mom; he's a shiftless stud, currently shacked up with a dimwitted aerobics instructor. She's the owner of an Oakland, California, bookshop specializing in black studies; he's the proprietor of, and TV pitchman for, a car dealership. She wears authentic African garments to work and rides a bicycle everywhere; he favors inauthentic cowboy duds and hogs the road in a four-by-four. Oh, yes, she's black, and he's white.

But Made in America sees this, the most obvious difference between Sarah Mathews (Whoopi Goldberg) and Hal Jackson (Ted Danson), as the least of their problems. It's not so much the discovery that, because of a mix-up at a sperm bank, Hal may be the father of her child that sends Sarah into orbit. It's the notion that after he is identified and tracked down, this particular white man, so trashy, so hopelessly incorrect politically and socially, could have ^ provided half the genetic material for her talented, pretty daughter Zora (Nia Long).

It's hard to think of a more widely appealing comic strategy than this. By banishing the issue of racial conflict, the movie remakes the world as every person of goodwill wishes it really were. And by making all the conflicts between Sarah and Hal purely cultural and therefore subject to good-humored behavioral modification, the movie implies that everything else dividing us today can be worked out with equal simplicity.

It appears to be Goldberg's mission in life to redeem improbable situations. It's what she did so profitably last summer in Sister Act, and she's awfully good at it. There's something about her -- a gritty, down-to-earth straightforwardness -- that tends to promise some realization of our wan hopes that potentially explosive circumstances can be defused -- at least for the running time of a movie.

Of course, it helps if the picture contains plenty of distracting farce and an equal measure of disarming sentimentality. It helps too if you can partner Goldberg with someone as agreeable and unthreatening as Danson, if you can find a director as comically inventive as Richard Benjamin, and if you can figure out a way to cast Will Smith. He plays Zora's best friend, Tea Cake, and his marvelously freewheeling choral effects -- a muttered aside here, a strangled warning there -- give the movie a waywardness it desperately needs.

For Made in America is basically one long evasive action, a nice little entertainment designed to whisper sweet nothings in our ear about two very edgy matters, race and sex. Because it's so comforting, it will probably make a ton of money. But bitter truth -- anyway an occasional touch of it -- can be funny too and, these days, quite useful.