MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Love’s’ Tale of Fatherhood Rings Hollow

It seems like only yesterday--in fact, it was only yesterday--that babies were big in the movies. This kitchy-kitschy-koo era, typified by “Three Men and a Baby,” has receded somewhat, but a few stray gurgles and burps can still be heard.

“Funny About Love” stars Gene Wilder as Duffy Bergman, a Garry Trudeau-like cartoonist whose marriage, his second, founders on the couple’s inability to produce a child. His new wife, Meg Lloyd (Christine Lahti), is an aspiring chef. The irony, I suppose, is that these two long-in-the-tooth yuppies can create everything to make their lives happy except the most important thing. Even though both are highly accomplished in their careers, their frustration in becoming parents breaks them apart. “Funny About Love” (citywide) is designed as a cautionary comedy: It’s saying that men have biological clocks, too. Duffy doesn’t realize how much he wants a child until he realizes he can’t have one.

As Gene Wilder plays him, Duffy is abrasive and almost cruelly honest. It’s obvious that his initial objections to fatherhood are selfish: In his world there’s room for only one baby. Even though his role isn’t written with any great insight, Wilder’s early scenes with Lahti have a complicated psychological undercurrent.

Meg’s on her second marriage, too, and we can see in her exhilarated flush the look of a woman who is trying to cancel her past woes and re-invigorate her emotional life from scratch. Lahti manages to make Meg both caustic and touching; she recognizes Duffy’s wormy self-centeredness but she also tries to save herself by floating above it all. Lahti is one of those amazing actresses who is doubly amazing for bringing out the best in her co-stars. She is a virtuoso team player. Along with the director, Leonard Nimoy, she keeps Wilder relatively shtick-free.

Wilder is trying to give a totally selfless performance about a selfish man, and with a better script, he might have succeeded. But “Funny About Love,” written by Norman Steinberg and David Frankel, is one of those movies that appears to have been concocted by committee.

The drama is driven less by logic than by whatever (a) gets a laugh and (b) offends the fewest people. Duffy’s abrasiveness turns out to be only a pose; he is really a cuddly puddy-tat. There is a great comic idea in having a bratty man pine for a baby, but the filmmakers won’t give up their Kleenex concession. They want us to realize that Duffy’s childishness is the key to his innate sensitivity, and it’s all just too gooey.

In a way, “Funny About Love” (rated PG-13) would have been more effective if two lightweight, nothing-special actors had been cast as Duffy and Meg. With Lahti and Wilder, and with Mary Stuart Masterson, who plays Duffy’s sorority sister fling, you’re always aware of the clash between the script’s sugarcoating and the performers’ acidity. The happy ending has a perfectly hollow ring.

‘FUNNY ABOUT LOVE’

A Paramount Pictures release. Producer Jon Avnet and Jordan Kerner. Director Leonard Nimoy. Screenplay Norman Steinberg & David Frankel. Cinematography Fred Murphy. Music Miles Goodman. Production design Stephen Storer. Costumes Albert Wolsky. Film editor Peter Berger. With Gene Wilder, Christine Lahti, Mary Stuart Masterson, Stephen Tobolowsky.

Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (mild sexual situations.)