Charm Offensive

By RICHARD CORLISS

Movies used to sail on charm. Gorgeous stars would purr their smooth patter, smile their way out of embarrassing entanglements and seal their conquest of a co-star--and a worldwide audience--with a kiss. Today that sounds So Old, but it was the standard for a half-century. Once in a while a director makes a movie that tries to recapture that warm feeling. It's harder than it looks, as a couple of new films prove.

A Good Year, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Marc Klein from the Peter Mayle novel, practically does backflips to win you over. It tosses London investment banker Max Skinner (Russell Crowe) into a sleepy town in Provence, where, be warned, he will get life and love lessons from the locals. It's like Cars but without the animation, if you know what I mean.

Crowe, despite his loutish rep, is forever surprising viewers by slipping snugly into the disparate characters he plays. This time he surprises by failing. Oh, he can do engaging as smartly as he does stalwart or tortured, but he gets sabotaged by the cloying script. Even before a long, agonizingly unfunny scene that Skinner spends at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, the film's desperate smile has turned into a rictus. Don't expect to be beguiled by A Good Year. That would be like trying to warm your hands at an artificial fireplace.

Stranger Than Fiction has a surer aim at getting through the brain to the heart. Zack Helm's script imagines a decent, solitary fellow named Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), then springs the notion that he may well be a fiction--a character in a work in progress by reclusive novelist Karen (Kay) Eiffel (Emma Thompson). And when Kay figures out how to kill off the character, Harold will die.

A more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy. Director Marc Forster and a tony cast (Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah) hit every punch line with a gong, and Ferrell, who's quiet and fine, seems as lost among them as Harold is in his suddenly fictional world.

Where does that leave old-fashioned movie charm? Waiting for someone to bring Cary Grant back to life.