Andie's Arrival

By RICHARD CORLISS

You don't have to be an AARP member to get misty about classic-style Hollywood romantic comedy--or to wonder what ever happened to it. Here were people at their most attractive, dreaming and scheming, who spoke effortlessly in the sort of dialogue that would occur to us only after the door slammed in our face. Witty words for pretty people: that was the clever format. In the mouths of glamorous stars, romantic comedy gave a sly intelligence to the pursuit of love. It made the amorous heart beat smartly.

Wax nostalgic no more. The old form is alive--with a nice femme kick--in British writer-director John McKay's Crush. The film bubbles with acid wit, in the tradition of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, while simmering with the ache of lust pursued and love lost. Pleasanter still, it provides a career-defining role for its all-American star, Andie MacDowell, who's been nibbling at the edges of moviegoers' attention for 20 years and now gets to stand center screen, tall and gorgeous. Combined with her stalwart turn in Elie Chouraqui's Harrison's Flowers, as a journalist searching hell-on-earth Bosnia for her photographer husband, Crush proves that the South Carolinian beauty has completed her trek from actress-model to model actress.

"I've worked very hard to get where I am," she says in her intimate drawl. And she has arrived there at an age (she will be 44 this month) when so many actresses are wistfully thinking of where they have been, because where they are is on the unemployment line.

MacDowell might have ended up there after her very first film. The Tarzan adventure Greystoke made her the punch line to an industry joke, when her dialogue was dubbed by Glenn Close. It took a complex role as the frustrated wife in Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) for the actress to show moviegoers and Hollywood that she was an actress. The Object of Beauty, Groundhog Day and Four Weddings and a Funeral solidified her status as a go-to gal to ornament the smarter comedies for grownups. But in Crush, MacDowell is the center of the action and the acting. It's her movie, and she soars with it.

She's Kate, headmistress of a school in an English village. Each week Kate and her best friends--a physician (Anna Chancellor) and a policewoman (Imelda Staunton)--meet to spill their latest ordeals d'amour and decide who among them is the most pathetic of all. Then Kate tumbles into an affair with Jed (dishy Kenny Doughty), a former student who moonlights as a church organist. This steams her friends, who see the affair as a threat to the only family they know. Chicanery and worse follow, as the film dares a violent shift of tone but ends up in a sadder but wiser equipoise. Crush is a chick flick to this extent: it says that sisterhood is more important to a woman--more intense, perhaps suffocating--than marriage and a sex life.

Whether as Comedy Andie here or Tragedy Andie in Harrison's Flowers, MacDowell always rewards watching. Her long, lovely face is both active and pensive; it often seems torn between remembered joy and anticipated anguish. She also has the gift of cuing a change in a film's mood by letting the blood drain from her face.

There's a scene in Crush where she sits at the organ with Jed as he demonstrates how, with a simple change of key, he "can make anyone cry." It's Doughty's soliloquy, but as he plays, MacDowell simultaneously shrivels and blooms: Kate realizes that this kid means more to her than a quick roll in the churchyard--he is the ardent love she had not known she was missing. The happiness and pain send a tear down her cheek.

Few can beat MacDowell at the crying game. "Sometimes it's so easy--you have a few tears roll down your cheeks," she says. "And sometimes it hurts, because you have to go to a place you maybe haven't been. I'd just gone through my divorce before making Crush, so I was in a lot of pain--which actually helped!" In one scene, Kate has to confront her friends' betrayal. "When I started to cry," MacDowell says, "I didn't know if I was going to be able to stop."

The movie of MacDowell's life has a happy ending. Last year she wed Rhett Hartzog, a childhood friend; they live in Asheville, N.C., with the three children from her earlier marriage. And she is working on a sitcom pilot--for CBS, with her Four Weddings director Mike Newell--that would keep her close to home. "If you have children," she says, "if you're in your right mind, they've got to be your priority. My kids and my husband--that's my life. And acting is my job, a job I love. It's all a matter of balance."

Comedy; drama. Work; family. She has figured it out in an equation so elegant, it could be from a classic romantic comedy.