PERFECT PITCH

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The boss likes his staff settled down and therefore a little desperate: you know, mortgage, car and tuition payments, maybe a few bills from the orthodontist. When obligations exceed income, the folks at his ad agency work harder and more loyally. That's his theory, anyway, and Kate (Jennifer Aniston) doesn't fit it. She's single and living within an income that does not match her talent. A friend suggests she invent a fiance to get a raise based on this spurious evidence of stability. A wedding videographer named Nick (Jay Mohr) agrees to go along with the gag, hoping to turn their fake affair into the real thing.

What say, fans of romantic comedy? Can you accept the slightly silly place Picture Perfect is coming from? Can you predict the blissful place it's heading? Of course you can. What may surprise you--given the desperate energies being applied to this genre these days--is the film's confident, unforced air. Some of that derives from Aniston's performance, a nicely judged blend of intelligence and inexperience, briskness and softness. She is, as she proves every week on Friends, an actress who serenely lets the comedy come to her instead of frantically searching for it. Director and co-writer Glenn Gordon Caron, late of Moonlighting, operates in the same smart, patient manner. You might wish he and his colleagues had toasted Nick, their studmuffin, a little more crisply--enough of these puff-pastry leading men--but the rest of the roles are crunchy, and Picture, if not quite perfect, makes a nice light snack for a hot summer's day.

--R.S.