MOVIE REVIEW : MOORE AND LAHTI MAKE NICE ‘FRIENDS’

Perhaps the most appropriate word for Allan Burns’ “Just Between Friends” (citywide) is nice.

It’s a nice movie, with its heart in the right place. It’s overflowing with good will toward man-and-woman-kind. If you wanted to call up a movie and tell all your troubles to it for an hour or so, this might be the one you’d pick. You get the feeling that “Just Between Friends” would nod sympathetically, tell a few jokes to cheer you up, offer you hot coffee and doughnuts and bundle you off into the night with the name of the right professional to solve your problems.

You really don’t want to kick a friend, or a movie, like this--because, after all, how many have you got? Snarl at it too much and you’re liable to wind up with nothing but a “Highlander,” a “Hitcher” and a bunch of “Nomads” hanging around. Unfortunately, sunny dispositions can pall after a while--and “Just Between Friends” is just a little too apple-cheeked. Maybe even a little too nice.

It’s a contemporary comedy about female bonding, centering on a friendship between successful women older than 30. Since it’s been fashioned by two of the all-time experts at distaff comic relationships: writer-director-producer Allan Burns and star Mary Tyler Moore, collaborators for seven years on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show”--you may begin by expecting a lot of it. (You might expect even more, if you remember the successful movie-director debut of another MTM alumnus, James Brooks on “Terms of Endearment.”)

The situation is promising: Two women, apparently complete opposites, strike up a friendship at an aerobics class. One is a devoted, happy, upscale housewife (Moore); the other a wisecracking TV newswoman (Christine Lahti). Each supplies what the other lacks. The wife, Holly, is supremely organized; the newswoman, Sandy, helter-skelter and flaky.

Holly is attracted to Sandy’s freedom; Sandy admires Holly’s permanence and place. Holly has just enough humor (and insecurity) to enjoy Sandy’s sarcastic, half-envious digs at her. They seem beautifully complementary--a notion, it develops, that also occurred to Holly’s seismologist husband (Ted Danson), who started an affair with Sandy sometime back.

Given that premise, and this cast (including Sam Waterston as Danson’s buddy), the movie might have come up bright, warm and amusing. But a little male guilt may be operating here. Somewhere in the back of Burns’ mind, you sense a determination to do for female buddies what Newman-Redford (and Tracy-Gable or Cagney-O’Brien) did for male buddies. Beyond that, you sense a desire to present an upbeat, affirmative view--exalt the whole notion of feminine friendships.

Laudable goals, but perhaps they’re Burns’ undoing: Comedy doesn’t thrive on entirely exalted or affirmative motives. (That’s why Moore’s TV friendships with Cloris Leachman or Valerie Harper often rang so true: Phyllis droves you nuts and Rhoda was a scold.)

There’s also a questionably solemn plot twist that occurs halfway through the movie: a twist that manages to be too catastrophic and too pat at the same time.

But there’s one irresistible reason to see “Just Between Friends:” Lahti. Just as she did in “Swing Shift,” Lahti performs absolute miracles of scene larceny: walking off with almost everything but the trees and the furniture, every time she comes on camera.

Lahti, like Gene Hackman or Jack Nicholson, seems to less perform in her scenes than somehow inhabit them. Her Sandy has an entrancing mixture of ditziness and salty, hard-nosed cunning. The only thing you hope is that she doesn’t get bogged down in being the Eve Arden of the ‘80s. She obviously has a lot more to offer as, in fact, “Just Between Friends” might--if it just weren’t so nice.