Jersey Girl

IF you go to Robert Redford's Sundance Festival, you'll find the screenings littered with young men in suits talking excitedly into mobile phones. They are the Hollywood lookouts, desperate not to miss some young talent displaying his or her wares for the first time.

Actor Ben Affleck and director Kevin Smith were among those who had the phones buzzing with Chasing Amy. And, before that, Smith's Clerks caused even more of a stir. It was only a matter of time before both Affleck and Smith answered the call. So, here they are again, Affleck starring in and Smith writing and directing Jersey Girl.

The problem for both of them has been how to keep the talent they showed in small movies as fresh in big ones. Compromise is never easy and here it smells bad at times. Affleck plays a harried but successful Manhattan publicist with a BMW and a pretty, pregnant wife (Jennifer Lopez, his real-life ex).

But this intriguing pairing soon vanishes when she dies in childbirth, leaving him to cope with a baby girl. He also loses his job by insulting a client in front of the press.

Thanks largely to the efforts of his blue-collar father (the excellent George Carlin), the

baby survives and we flash forward to meet seven-year-old Raquel Castro, a fetching lassie who doesn't mind her father's new life in the Jersey cleansing department and can't understand why he wants to get back into his old middleclass profession. But he does, and he is sex-starved enough to keep on buying porn from the video shop. He hasn't had a woman in seven years, he tells the attractive girl behind the counter (Liv Tyler), who likes him enough to offer him a "mercy jump" after forcing him out on a reluctant date.

This part of the film is really the only sign that the audacious Smith of Clerks and Chasing Amy has directed it. The rest goes from bland to worse, ending with the old cliché of Dad racing back from a Manhattan interview to be just in time for his daughter's brilliant performance in the end-of-term school gala.

What's more dispiriting is that, though Affleck gives a decent performance and Tyler and the young Castro are also good, it panders to almost every Hollywood half-truth in the book. It's about as original as a McDonald's burger, without the new salads.

There is one thing, however, in its favour: Smith's shaky visual style has been much improved by the employment of Vilmos Zsigmond, a cinematographer who can even make a dustbin look good. But Jersey Girl is too smooth and comforting by half.

Jersey Girl
Cert: cert12A