This Project Is ‘Kissed’ by Talent

It’s taken some years, but Drew Barrymore’s career has finally come full circle. After she became America’s moppet sweetheart in 1982’s “E.T.,” the actress’ work and image took a series of hairpin turns, but now, with “Never Been Kissed,” she’s as warm and appealing as she ever was. Maybe even more.

An easygoing and amusing romantic confection, “Never Been Kissed” solidifies the work Barrymore did in last year’s “The Wedding Singer” and “Ever After.” At this point in time, there may be no American actress with the same combination of spunkiness and adorability, someone we so desperately want to see live happily ever after.

Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine “Never Been Kissed” and its story of a dowdy 25-year-old going back to high school as an undercover journalist succeeding without Barrymore’s core likability. With an improbable plot line that has the emotional texture of an episode of “Happy Days,” “Never Been Kissed” presents its star with speeches that would have flummoxed gee-whiz 1940s girl-next-door June Allyson. Yet Barrymore not only makes us buy this piffle, we even end up liking it.

Director Raja Gosnell edited the first two “Home Alone” movies (and directed the third), but there is none of John Hughes’ trademark maliciousness here. Taking advantage of the good-natured high spirits of the Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein script, Gosnell’s sense of fun makes all his characters engaging. Especially Josie Geller (Barrymore).

Josie’s a copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times who’s great at correcting grammatical mistakes, but she yearns for something more, both personally and professionally.

Despite having Anita (“Saturday Night Live’s” Molly Shannon), the paper’s Ms. Promiscuity, as her best friend, the borderline hefty Josie lives with her pet turtles and hasn’t been out on a real date in years. Frustrated with desk work, she’s eager to be a hard news reporter, though her rumpled editor Gus (John C. Reilly) tells her she isn’t the investigative type.

Then, as it often does in the movies, fate intervenes. Gus’ tyrannical boss Rigfort (Garry Marshall) decides he wants a story called “My Semester in High School” and picks Josie almost at random to get it done. She’s ecstatic, at least until her underachieving brother Rob (David Arquette at his most likable) reminds her of how awful her high school years really were.

We’re not just told how grim the old days were, we’re shown them as well. Barrymore, an actress clearly without excess vanity, added weight and makeup to portray the pitiful 17-year-old “Josie Grossie” in all her nightmarish agony. The re-creation is so convincing that the film is seduced into going back to Grossie more than it should: These painful, humiliating moments are no more fun for us than they were for her.

Barrymore’s splendid gameness stands the film in better stead when her character registers as a senior at South Glen South High. It turns out that high school, with its trio of too-hip girls who set the fashion standard, has not changed, and neither, at least at first, has Josie. She’s still just as much of a klutz as ever, still prone to spilling food on her clothes and making a total fool out of herself.

More than that, Josie turns out to be not the world’s greatest reporter, something that, in a “Truman Show” type riff, the entire newsroom gets to witness via a miniature video camera-pin attached to her clothes.

There are, however, compensations this time around. Like a handsome guy named Guy (Jeremy Jordan) who looks just like the lout Josie had a crush on in high school. And there’s the dreamy English teacher (Michael Vartan) who befriends Josie and strikes a chord with the undercover reporter when he tells her class, apropos Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” “in disguise we feel freer, we do things we wouldn’t do in ordinary life.”

Josie also gets befriended by Aldys (Leelee Sobieski), the class brain and the ringleader of a group of math types called “The Denominators” who are her first pals. Aldys could be a throwaway part, but as performed by this excellent young actress (“A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” the TV miniseries “Joan of Arc” and Stanley Kubrick’s forthcoming “Eyes Wide Shut”), it isn’t. While “Never Been Kissed” belongs heart and soul to Barrymore, Sobieski’s natural poise and assurance reminds us that her own prime time is not so very far away.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for a scene of sexuality. Times guidelines: a demonstration of condom use in a sex education class.

‘Never Been Kissed’

Drew Barrymore: Josie Geller

David Arquette: Rob Geller

Michael Vartan: Sam Coulson

Leelee Sobieski: Aldys

Jeremy Jordan: Guy Perkins

Molly Shannon: Anita

A Flower Films/Bushwood Pictures production, released by 20th Century Fox. Director Raja Gosnell. Producers Sandy Isaac, Nancy Juvonen. Executive producer Drew Barrymore. Screenplay Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein. Cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy. Editor Debra Chiate, Marcelo Sansevieri. Costumes Mona May. Music David Newman. Production design Steven Jordan. Art director William Hiney. Set decorator Suzette Sheets. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

In general release throughout Southern California.