‘Made in Heaven’ Less Than Divine

The English have an addictive adjective for anything that has become insufferably precious or affectedly clever. They call it twee and for an almost textbook example of twee, try “Made in Heaven” (citywide), a fantasy in which a young couple meet and fall in love in heaven, return to earth as babies and must find one another before their first 30 years are up.

Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis are the baby-loves, and sprinkled through the rest of the cast are such talents as Maureen Stapleton, Ellen Barkin, James Gammon, Mare Winningham, Amanda Plummer and Ann Wedgeworth, plus pop-up appearances by musicians Tom Petty, Neil Young and the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, and minuscule bits by writer Tom Robbins and cartoonist Gary Larson. Don’t blame yourself if you can’t spot Debra Winger; you’re not supposed to.

None of this casting is a surprise, considering that Alan Rudolph, a master of that sort of thing, is the director. The shock is just how little of “Made in Heaven” has the Rudolph stamp--that owlish blend of jaunty wariness and hip romanticism. It has moments, observations, small killer bits; some of it looks like Rudolph, and he has extracted a lovely performance from Hutton in both his roles, but especially as Elmo, the endearing goofus who finally finds himself as a musician.

But the fussy screenplay, written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, has been relentlessly overproduced (by Gideon, Evans and longtime Rudolph associate David Blocker), until it sinks under the weight of its heavy whimsy and its fragmented structure. Since Evans and Gideon were the writers of the genuinely affecting “Stand By Me,” it’s a double disappointment.

The disenchantment sneaks up on you. The first scenes, calculated to bring young Mike Shea (Hutton) to heaven, are fun; they contain such collectable memories as the guilelessness on Mare Winningham’s face as she breaks Hutton’s heart and sets the plot wheels in motion. And then there is heaven, where Maureen Stapleton, glorious as Hutton’s aunt and closest local relative, is his welcoming committee. She’s a little rushed, however, since discovering that up here she can paint, perhaps as “her reward for being so untalented on earth.” (Now there’s a comforting notion.)

Heaven is run by the cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinking Emmett Humbird, a relatively pragmatic duffer (played, the credits reveal coyly, by “himself”), whose freckles and haircut look a little like Alfalfa’s but who also looks in this suit like a character out of “The Men’s Club.”

On Hutton’s first quick tour around the place he spies Annie Packert (McGillis)--and true love strikes. It also wreaks havoc with logic. Hutton learns that, unlike him, she was born in heaven. “Then your parents did it,” he goggles, “in heaven?” At least twice, she beams; she has a brother. Hold on a minute. What does this do to the population of heaven? Who is allowed to “do it?” Who isn’t? You recall the kid in Diane Keaton’s “Heaven” asking, sensibly enough, “What do they make, little dead babies?”

But special-effects whiplash sets in before we have a chance to brood about this phenomenon. In this heaven you need only think yourself somewhere, think a new decorating scheme, think a dazzling new city outside your window and it’s there. All this appearing/disappearing becomes unsettling; you want to grab the scenery and hold onto it before it shifts again.

And that’s only heaven. Wait until you see what earth offers. Annie--on the brink of her heavenly wedding to Mike--is sent down to earth, reborn as upwardly mobile baby Ally, daughter of toy magnate Don Murray. Mike follows, recycled as the less fortunate Elmo and warned that he has only his first 30 years to re-find his love.

We now have two parallel stories to follow, in dizzying and seemingly random detail and with two not very parallel performances. McGillis, who in the past has seemed spirited and interesting, floats through the heavenly portion like one long soap commercial and seems bemused and unconnected to things in the earthly section. (Almost anyone would be bemused by the cat’s cradle of plot that Ally must pick her way through: a love-match marriage, a rueful divorce, a skyrocketing career, a bizarre couple of romances. By the film’s conclusion she’s been everything but an astronaut and perhaps the heavenly section compensated for that.)

Hutton, on the other hand, seems to be having a crackerjack time rambling through life as Elmo. It’s the loosest, funniest anyone’s ever let him be; a relief from the earnestness and melodrama that is usually his lot, and as he ricochets through the countryside, belting out “If You Want Me to Stay” along with Sly Stone on the radio, he is spiffy. His other high point is his encounter with Ellen Barkin’s devilishly seductive Lucille (Lucifer?) in a roadhouse run by Tom Petty.

But great moments do not a movie make. Cluttered with incident and determinedly fey characters, this plot has thickened to the point of suffocation. By the film’s end--when no one has the energy to care whether these lovers meet in time or not--even Rudolph’s Catherine wheel of inventiveness has spluttered out.