Bounce
Miramax, 2000
Directed by Don Roos

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Bounce is writer/director Don Roos' tender musing on fate and love. The title suggests the random ways seemingly minor circumstances can collide to radically change people's lives.

For instance, Ben Affleck's hot shot ad exec, Buddy, literally bumps into playwright Greg (Tony Goldwyn) in the middle of a crowded airport bar during a snowstorm. If either man leans an inch in the other direction, they never collide, and thus never meet. Buddy would never spotaneously offer Greg his airplane seat and it would be Buddy who would die in the crash that instead kills Greg. If Greg doesn't die, then Buddy never has the chance to fall in love with Greg's widow Abby (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Fate, the movie shows us, also goes hand-in-hand with guilt. Buddy's guilt over seeing someone else die in his place leads him to drink. His guilt is only compounded when he finds himself falling for the woman whom he believes he's caused such pain -- let alone the shame he feels for lying to her about the fact he ever met Greg in the first place. All this angst forms the somber backdrop hangs over the light romance at the heart of the picture. Buddy's cautious courtship of Abby has some sweet moments, moments enhanced by the tension the audience feels by knowing the bottom could drop out at any moment.

For Roos, the movie is a distinctly commercial follow-up to his dark festival-hit comedy The Opposite of Sex. This time he relegates his autobiographical themes of alcoholism and homosexuality to minor subplots and swings for the multiplexes with a mainstream story of love triumphing from the ashes of tragedy. Affleck, who won his Oscar for writing, gives the best performance yet in his young career. His former flame Paltrow (the two had already broken-up by the time they made the movie -- or so they claim) did win her Oscar for acting but, ironically, she is less stellar as the suffering Abby. Her performance is decent, but the movie only confirms her as both the most overrated beauty and the most overrated thespian Hollywood has today.

(c) Copyright 2000