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Rumour Has It

**

Directed by Rob Reiner

Written by T. M. Griffin

Starring Jennifer Aniston,

Mark Ruffalo, Kevin Costner

and Shirley MacLaine

Classification: PG

At the beginning of Robert Altman's 1992 Hollywood satire, The Player, there is a scene with Buck Henry, the screenwriter of The Graduate, pitching a sequel to his renowned 1967 film.

"Okay, here it is: The Graduate, Part II! Ben and Elaine are married still, living in a big old spooky house in Northern California somewhere. Mrs. Robinson, her aging mother, lives with them. She's had a stroke. And they've got a daughter in college. Julia Roberts, maybe. It'll be dark and weird and funny. With a stroke." Henry later said he did the scene in the hopes it would prevent anyone from actually doing a Graduate sequel. Now, in the way Hollywood reality keeps overrunning satire, we have Rumour Has It, a movie that takes up that challenge. Flaccid title aside, the premise is at least potentially funny.

When a woman in her 30s (Jennifer Aniston) discovers that her grandmother and mother were the inspiration behind the novel-turned-movie, The Graduate, she decides to find the real-life version of Benjamin Braddock, who slept with both of them. The script has all the characteristics of a quirky American indie film, featuring a heroine on a search for identity and family links, combined with transgressive comedy, with its queasy suggestion of father-daughter incest.

At some point in the movie's development, the directorial chore was taken away from its original director, screenwriter T. M. Griffin, and handed over to Rob Reiner. Reiner, still riding that long coast since Sleepless in Seattle, seems to have come on board to package it as a romantic comedy.

In the long voiceover preamble, Aniston, as Sarah Huttinger, relates the "rumour" that the story of The Graduate was based on a real-life affair between a 21-year-old Pasadena man who had an affair with a 42-year-old woman and subsequently slept with her about-to-be-married daughter. In the real-life version, the daughter subsequently returned to her fiancé.

Forward to 1997, when Sarah, an antsy New York journalist and her fiancé (Mark Ruffalo) are flying to California for the wedding of her younger sister (Mena Suvari). Sarah feels alienated from her perky sister and her easygoing father (Richard Jenkins) for a series of trivial reasons: He drives slowly, she drives fast; they like tennis, she doesn't. After a boozy heart-to-heart with her grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) about her own engagement jitters, Sarah concludes that her biological father is a man with whom her late mother had a fling. Further sleuthing leads her to conclude that her grandmother is the model for Mrs. Robinson, and that a San Francisco computer tycoon called Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) is the model for The Graduate's Benjamin Braddock and her biological father.

A meeting at a high-tech conference leads to drinks and sex and -- whoops! -- apparently, he's not actually her dad. Or, then again, a couple of scenes later, maybe he is. The back-and-forth starts to suggest an unholy blend of Pretty Woman (he buys her a dress, he takes her to a ball) and David O. Russell's Oedipal comedy, Spanking the Monkey.

Unfortunately, the incest panic represents the only real dramatic tension of the story. Almost everything else is exposition, a series of confessions in which Sarah manages to sort out her misunderstandings.

There are a few good casting calls. Sarah's fiancé is mostly out of the picture, finally catching up with her at an inopportune moment, but the soulful Ruffalo manages to shift emotional sympathy in his direction. Costner, though nothing like the nebbishy Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate, is convincing as a smooth, middle-aged roué, and even Shirley MacLaine is economical as the hard-tippling, tough-talking old bird.

The real weak point is Reiner's listless direction, with too few scenes that almost gel and too many that fall flat. This leaves the Friend-less Aniston, who is in the movie throughout, left to negotiate the tonal shifts from sequence to sequence, mostly through constant costume changes and telegraphed reactions. Aniston has a comic style crystallized from her years on television, but it's difficult to locate a living character between her two reflexive performance modes, briskly cute or wide-eyed and wistful.