MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Peter’s Friends’ Weds British, Yankee Comedy : Kenneth Branagh’s latest directorial effort is a jokey ‘Big Chill’ with a high laugh quotient.

The most surprising thing about “Peter’s Friends” (selected theaters) is that even after you make all the obvious allowances for how jokey and cloying and derivative it is, it still makes you laugh--a lot. It’s being rapped as a British “Big Chill” and that’s not entirely inaccurate. But this friends-getting-together genre is surprisingly durable; it was also the armature for “Return of the Secaucus 7” and “Decline and Fall of the American Empire.” And Kenneth Branagh, who directed from a script by Rita Rudner and Martin Bregman, brings something distinctive to the mix, something specifically theatrical. “Peter’s Friends” has a spirited conviviality.

The film opens in 1982 with a bawdy, low-grade New Year’s Eve musical revue being performed by a troupe of graduating collegians for an unamused stuffed-shirt audience. Afterward, backstage, we get a woozy glimpse of the troupe, just enough for us to place them for the rest of the film, which picks up their lives 10 years later. Peter (Stephen Fry) has invited his old classmates to his family’s country estate, which he has recently inherited after the loss of his father, for New Year’s Eve. He’s a gangly, bemused chap with a clipped wit: the kind of upper-crust roustabout with lots of promise and almost nothing to show for it. His friends view his estate as another theatrical proscenium. The weekend turns into another revue, only this time their messy personal lives are the substance of the show.

Andrew (Kenneth Branagh) aspired to be a playwright in college but instead moved to Hollywood and created a cruddy hit sitcom called “Who’s in the Kitchen?” Its star, Carol (Rita Rudner), is also his wife. They’re a classic Hollywood mismatch: He’s aggrieved at having sold out; she’s piqued that the price was not high enough. Rudner has perfected the outsized vanity of the second-rate celebrity. When Carol walks into a crowded room she demands a hush, which she then fills with her own knockabout chatter. Carol is a dainty harridan: Her filigree has sharp edges.

Two other couples also show up for the weekend, Roger (Hugh Laurie) and Mary (Imelda Staunton), who lost one of their children recently and are neurotically fearful of losing the other; and the irrepressibly randy Sarah (Alphonsia Emmanuel), who has brought along her latest lover, the married-with-children Brian (Tony Slattery). Then there’s Maggie (Emma Thompson), a frumpy, helpless waif who works for a publishing company and pastes photos of herself around her apartment so her cat won’t miss her.

This crew is almost too perfectly concocted for farce, but Branagh doesn’t quite have the skills to spin them into a Feydeau-ish whirl. He also doesn’t really have the script to achieve the kind of neo-Noel Coward vehicle that at other times he seems to be trying for. Rudner and Bergman’s script tries to be all of these things and more: It’s also trying to be heartfelt sitcom and Monty Pythonesque and just about everything else. This scattershot approach ought to be disastrous except that a lot of the shots hit home: like the moment when Maggie, who believes the bisexual Peter is her perfect mate if only he would recognize it, walks in on him in his bedroom and proclaims, “Fill me with your little babies!”

At its best, “Peter’s Friends” (Times-rated Mature for occasional strong language) weds the brittle lunacy of British comedy with its more supple American counterpart. The couple worrying for their child drags down the fun, and the Sarah/Brian confabs run their predictable course. But whenever Branagh and Rudner and Thompson and Stephen Fry are around the film is a hoot.

Branagh is great at showing off Andrew’s self-loathing; he does a great tearful drunken jag near the end where he manages to turn Andrew’s misery into a kind of burlesque. Emma Thompson’s Maggie is so accommodating she seems stunted; she’s blissfully unaware of the stratagems of love. Fry gives Peter an archness that barely covers his naked sincerity. He wants to do right by everybody, he wants everybody to have a good time. He cares a great deal for the success of these weekend revels because the frivolities are the only thing left that give his wayward life any ballast. He is defined, in the end, by his friends, and, as screwed up as they are, they repay his generosity.

‘Peter’s Friends’

Kenneth Branagh: Andrew

Alphonsia Emmanuel: Sarah

Stephen Fry: Peter

Rita Rudner: Carol

A Samuel Goldwyn Co. release of a Renaissance Film production, produced in association with Film Four Intl. Director Kenneth Branagh. Producer Kenneth Branagh. Executive producer Stephen Evans. Screenplay by Rita Rudner and Martin Bregman. Cinematographer Roger Lanser. Editor Andrew Marcus. Costumes Susan Coates. Production design Tim Harvey. Art director Martin Childs. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (occasional strong language and sexual situations).