MOVIE REVIEWS : THE FAST AND SASSY WORLDS OF MEN AND WOMEN : ‘Making Mr. Right’

Susan Seidelman’s “Making Mr. Right” (citywide) tackles a heartfelt subject--where have all the good men gone?--with style and with one oddly touching performance, but with a curious lack of heart. The premise, that an android might solve the modern woman’s troubles with modern men, sounds bright. Well, possible. The movie is brassy, its milk of human kindness curdled, its comic eye jaundiced.

The story gives a modern career woman, whose private life is a shambles, the job of humanizing a state-of-the-art android, Ulysses, into something a little more state-of-the-heart. Ulysses is about to be launched on a seven-year probe of deep space, and in order for him to capture the public’s attention, it’s felt he must have a few of the qualities--warmth, caring, affection, even love--that his look-alike creator, Jeff Peters, has sternly programmed out of him. It’s not surprising: Peters lacks even a chemical trace of those qualities himself.

The movie’s zingiest performance, and the sole reason to even consider seeing it, is by John Malkovich. In bright blond shoulder-length Dynel hair, he plays both the churlish scientist and the inquisitive, sweet-spirited android with such wizardry that they seem to be two separate actors.

It’s not simply the film’s superior special effects (courtesy of Bran Ferren). Malkovich’s motions as Ulysses have a brilliant range of control; they seem to emanate from some interior gyroscope and to pick up dexterity as he learns more of human emotions. For Peters, Malkovich calls forth bottled-up inner anger; he is fierce and unapproachable in his scientist’s shyness and distaste for the non-scientific world.

But that’s it for the movie’s charm--and only one of those two characters could be called charming. “Making Mr. Right” is, at least, evenhanded; it seems to regard both the men and women of the story as objects for cool, lip-curling superiority.

Director Seidelman may love her heroine, Frankie Stone (Ann Magnuson), a high-powered Miami Beach “image consultant” but from the first moment we see her, roaring heedlessly down the freeway in her red Corvair convertible, it’s Frankie who seems to need some image work. A menace to other drivers as she puts on her eye makeup and tidies up shins and underarms with an electric shaver, she parks--as she always does--by crashing up onto the curb and flounces in to her waiting clients, announcing, “I’m always late--but I’m worth it.”

This sort of head-on chutzpah can backfire, prompting audiences to supress a snarled, “Oh yeah, prove it.” Unfortunately, screenwriters Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank don’t show Frankie as the creative whiz-kid that would justify this arrogance. And if this is today’s modern woman, no wonder things have gone awry with the planet’s men.

Just possibly, Goldie Hawn could have gotten away with this more than a dozen years ago, using a kind of ditzy, eye-batting charm that she’s quite properly moved away from today. Bette Midler could do it now, with an entirely different tone--forgivable brashness. But Magnuson, well-considered as a performance artist, has been directed with no more expiating warmth than the rest of the picture’s women and so she seems strident and flinty.

The other women include Frankie’s sister, Ivy (Susan Berman, star of Seidelman’s first film, “Smithereens”). The humor of her character comes from her determination in going ahead with her marriage to a Cuban busboy. (The plentiful ethnic jokes concern garish bridesmaid dresses, bilingual wedding ceremonies, and another armpit sight gag. This is what women directors’ insights have come to: pit jokes?)

Frankie’s mother (Polly Bergen) is a caricatured Miami Beach Jewish matron. (In a share-the-slur policy, Jewish jokes run neck and neck with Cuban ones here.) Frankie’s friend (Glenne Headly, in life Mrs. Malkovich) is a frazzled dumb-dumb, intent on luring back her two-timing soap opera star-husband (Hart Bochner, virtually unrecognizable). The unkindest role of all is Sandy (Laurie Metcalf), the lab technician at Peters’ plant, more man-hungry than Audrey Two in “Little Shop of Horrors,” more grotesque and a lot less funny.

The men fare no better, between Peters’ mysogyny and the wimpy two-timing of Frankie’s politician ex-boyfriend (Ben Masters), a reed that bends with every wind. But if you want real contempt for a character, consider the fate the film makers assign to scientist Peters at the end of the film (a plot point we won’t reveal).

The film seems to bask in its own cleverness, in the post-modern trendiness of its settings (designed by Barbara Ling), or in the photography’s successful attempt to make things look like a Technicolor movie of the ‘50s (the cameraman was Edward Lachman). But in this rush for the stunning visual, the “amusing” put-down, the screen has been emptied of anyone we even remotely care about. Even an adroid deserves better than that.

‘MAKING MR. RIGHT’ An Orion Pictures Corp. release of a Barry & Enright production. Execuive producers Susan Seidelman, Dan Enright. Producers Mike Wise, Joel Tuber. Director Seidelman. Camera Edward Lachman. Editor/associate producer Andrew Mondshein. Production design Barbara Ling. Music Chaz Jankel. Costumes Rudy Dillon, Adelle Lutz. Special visual effects Bran Ferren. Art director Jack Blackman, set decorators Scott Jacobson, Jimmy Robinson II. With John Malkovich, Ann Magnuson, Ben Masters, Glenne Headly, Laurie Metcalf, Polly Bergen, Hart Bochner.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned to give special guidance for attendance of children under 13)

Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.