MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Date With Angel’ Not Exactly Heaven-Sent

Emmanuelle Beart--who plays an angel sent to earth on some mysterious celestial errand in “Date With an Angel” (which opened Friday citywide)--has a face that really looks angelic. Blond, creamy-skinned, delicate, with meltingly lovely blue eyes, she reminds you of the young Catherine Deneuve. Beart was the vengeful daughter in Claude Berri’s “Manon of the Springs,” and she plays her role here almost wordlessly, with a set of limpid smiles, childish pouts and radiantly adoring gazes. Watching her--surrounded with the halo of light that cinematographer Alex Thomson has spun around her--you almost melt yourself.

Unfortunately, after Beart, there are no more heavenly grace notes in “Date With an Angel.” It’s an insipid attempted romantic-fantasy movie of seraphic silliness, as shallow and weightless as a plastic cherub teetering on a polyethylene Christmas tree.

In the movie, free-spirited musician Jim Sanders is engaged to the spoiled-rotten daughter (Phoebe Cates) of a neurotic cosmetics king (David Dukes). Obviously, this sweet, sappy guy--whom we first see playing his harmonica all alone in the rain--needs an ethereal lover. Everybody around him either screeches incessantly (Cates), twitches and bullies (Dukes), kvetches (his mother, played by Bibi Besch) or acts like his lunatic college buddies.

This hell-raising, good-time trio (Phil Brock, Pete Kowanko and Albert Macklin) are just the kind of pals a sweet-sappy guy would have: wild frat-house pranksters who start off by terrorizing the engagement party with toy guns and rubber grenades--a prank which, amazingly, everyone immediately forgets. When Beart makes a splashdown in Jim’s swimming pool, breaking her right wing--we’re primed for another example of the pina colada and soft rock “You and me against the world, Babe” romantic comedy, with celestial trimmings.

You can tell the film makers have their hearts in the right place. But, unfortunately, they’re wearing their heads on their sleeve. Writer-director Tom McDonough--an ex-mime who handles Beart’s wordless scenes very well--self-destructs when his people start talking. His script hits all the obvious notes, clanging along like a tin gong in a cathedral vestibule. Maybe he’s trying to reawaken the gently comic supernatural fantasies of the ‘40s--a laudable goal--but the film keeps bogging down into a holy water “Splash” with heavenly choirs in Muzak and “My Mother, the Car” level plot complications.

The movie, like its characters, seems to race around frenetically half the time and wear a dumb, happy grin for the rest. A pity. Emmanuelle Beart, at times--when the script doesn’t make her a French fry-craving dolt--can almost suggest a genuine, shimmering, earthbound angel. It’s only the earth around her that’s flat, bogus and paper-winged.