IF JOHN COULD SEE THEM NOW...

By RICHARD CORLISS

In the 1984 documentary "I'm almost not crazy..." John Cassavetes defines filmmaking as "waiting around...for your dynamic turn." That surely applies to his own improvisatory works: Shadows, Faces, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz. They are anguished home movies of actors searching for the precise pitch of rage or love. The films mean to grapple with painful truth, but it can seem ages between epiphanies. A Cassavetes movie often plays like two hours in the waiting-waiting-waiting room of the Actors Studio.

The weird thing about She's So Lovely is that a script by the impresario of improv, directed by his son, should become a tight, slight, goofy romance. As the lovestruck Eddie, Sean Penn denounces his wife's perfume as "a good smell to cover up bad smell." John Travolta, as the second husband of Eddie's beloved Maureen (Robin Wright Penn), snaps at his young stepdaughter, "You haven't lived long enough for me to argue with you. You're just a glorified piece of blue sky." The film has the soul of a sailor after a few drinks, and the mouth of a randier Damon Runyon.

The guilty secret of John Cassavetes' films was that they relied on Hollywood star quality. His lupine smile sent out laser beams of frantic menace, and Gena Rowlands had (still has) a face the camera can't stop watching. When she shows up in She's So Lovely to hear Penn murmur, "You're a very beautiful woman, and I haven't been around the kindness of women in some time," it's a sweet tribute from this generation of Method mesmerizers to the one who taught them how.

Director Nick Cassavetes is less a full-fledged auteur here than a cheerleader and referee, keeping the stars fighting without biting. Wright, like Maureen, is game for any outsize challenge, but her bantam desperation sounds shrill; at times she is overrun by the wild gestures that seize Maureen. Travolta, though, balances nicely on a seesaw of caring and exasperation; and Penn has every garish shade of Eddie in his palette. He gets the pain, charm and drive, the stumbling humor of a guy whose only religion is the woman who betrayed him. He turns a jerk into a heroic figure: St. Doofus.

--Richard Corliss