‘It Could Happen to You’ Is Just the Ticket : A cop gives a waitress half of his $4-million lottery payoff in Andrew Bergman’s cheery fairy tale.

Charlie Lang (Nicolas Cage) is a New York cop with an overdose of decency. He’s sweet and affable and he believes in keeping his word--he’s like Forrest Gump with an elevated IQ.

When Charlie finds himself in a diner short of a tip, he makes a pie-in-the-sky promise to his waitress (Bridget Fonda) to give her half of any possible winnings on his just-purchased lottery ticket. When the ticket pays $4 million, Charlie, moving against his aghast, social-climbing wife (Rosie Perez), does the right thing.

“It Could Happen to You” is a romantic comedy about the consequences of doing the right thing. It’s slight but sweet: It might have been made by Charlie Lang himself. It’s not easy to make a movie about a character--particularly an adult of some intelligence--who is all good. Goodness in the movies is often a guarantee of blandness. Goodness usually means a civics lesson is lurking in the brush.

But even though “It Could Happen to You” has its tenderized, good citizenship side, it’s been written (by Jane Anderson) and directed (by Andrew Bergman) with an embracing cheer. It’s blissfully uncynical. When Yvonne, the wide-eyed waitress who came to New York from Pittsburgh five years ago, tells Charlie that what he did is “like a fairy tale,” she’s also cuing the audience what to expect.

Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel keeps the New York cityscapes delicately soft--the grime has a pastel shimmer. Turning New York into a magical aerie where ordinary folk can win millions and sweet-hearted romance can bloom may seem as far-fetched a goal as actually lucking into the lottery. But in its own modest, beseeching way, the urban transformation in this movie works.

Of course, the filmmakers cheat a bit. They draw their romantic feeling from a sugared ‘40s conception of the city, with Sinatra and Tony Bennett doing their versions of “Young at Heart” on the soundtrack. The nostalgia isn’t as gummy as it was in “Sleepless in Seattle,” a movie that also went in for a those-were-the-days romanticism. The romanticism in that movie seemed forced. In “It Could Happen to You,” it just wafts off the screen.

Cage and Fonda are perfectly paired. Cage, for that matter, also seems perfectly paired with Perez, and with Wendell Pierce, who plays his partner, and just about everybody else in the film. He’s become a remarkably generous and versatile performer. Is there any other actor who can play zigzag dementia as well as he can--in films like “Wild at Heart” and “Vampire’s Kiss”--and then turn around and play zigzag normality--as in “Moonstruck” and Bergman’s “Honeymoon in Vegas” and now “It Could Happen to You”--with equal conviction? It could be that, for Cage, these ordinary guys are the weirdest of incarnations--normality as the ultimate masquerade. But he doesn’t condescend to these characters or turn them into schmoes. He respects their tiny dreams and so, of course, when the dreams pay off big, they don’t seem so ordinary anymore. These characters become figures in a fable.

Fonda shares Cage’s grace and gift for simple gestures. Her Yvonne, bankrupt and on the outs from a crumbum husband (Stanley Tucci), still manages to cling to her romantic illusions. She’s untarnished: Her white waitress uniform looks angelic on her. Fonda lets Yvonne’s emotions out slowly; as the inevitable romance with Charlie develops, her eyes grow wider and her smile radiates. She’s the emblem of happiness, and we can see why the married Charlie would be drawn to her--even though it messes with his rectitude.

All our sympathies are with Charlie, though, because Perez plays his wife like a gold-digging chatterbox. (“I’m a person who needs money,” she squeals.) She’s a cartoon Emma Bovary: Stuck with her dull, decent husband in Queens, she craves shopping sprees at Saks. Perez’s life-of-the-party spiritedness and rat-a-tat locutions give the film a buzz. Post-lottery, she twinkles like a 44-carat diamond, and she’s just about as hard. Her redecorated apartment is such a gaudy-tacky wonder that it’s practically an amusement park.

Bergman eases into conventionality a bit too cozily in “It Could Happen to You.” It lacks his trademark nut-ball inspirations: like that scene in “The Freshman” where Bert Parks serenaded Marlon Brando with Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” or the parachuting Elvis impersonators in “Honeymoon in Vegas.” But he pulls off the central romantic conceit in this film without a hitch, and that’s not easy. Charlie and Yvonne are each other’s lucky charms. They don’t need to win a lottery. They’re already rich--they have hearts of gold.

* MPAA rating: PG, for mild language and a scene of cop action. Times guidelines: It includes a fairly graphic convenience store robbery.

‘It Could Happen to You’ Nicolas Cage: Charlie Lang Bridget Fonda: Yvonne Biasi Rosie Perez: Muriel Lang Wendell Pierce: Bo Williams A TriStar Pictures release of an Adelson/Baumgarten and Lobell/Bergman production. Director Andrew Bergman. Producer Mike Lobell. Executive producers Gary Adelson, Craig Baumgarten, Joseph Hartwick. Screenplay Jane Anderson. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Editors Barry Malkin. Costumes Julie Weiss. Music Carter Burwell. Production design Bill Groom. Set decorator George DeTitta Jr. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.