MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Rhapsody’: A Song of Comic Infidelity

“Miami Rhapsody,� a comedy about marital jitters starring Sarah Jessica Parker, is full of funny performers and beautiful Miami scenery and classic pop tunes but it still seems awfully familiar. It’s not just that it keeps reminding you of Woody Allen--reportedly it’s working title was “Miami.� It also reminds you of Neil Simon and a barrage of sort-of-bright TV sitcoms.

Writer-director David Frankel, making his feature-film debut, has created a number of TV series, including “Doctor, Doctor� and “Teech,� and his approach to the audience is very punchy and direct. He times the scenes for quick, flip giggles; the film practically comes with its own laugh track. And the “serious� moments are just as glib--they come with their own sob track.

Parker plays Gwyn Marcus, a frizzy-haired neurotic who opens the film by telling us--she’s actually addressing her psychiatrist--about the time her boyfriend Matt (Gil Bellows) proposed to her a year before. As we see in flashback, Gwyn has a Commitment problem. To make matters worse, she instinctively looks to her immediate family for encouragement to take the plunge and discovers their marriages are awash in infidelity.

Her younger sister Leslie (Carla Gugino) marries a football hero (Bo Eason) who turns out to be less tight end than tightwad; Gwyn ends up walking in on her dalliance with an old high school flame. Her brother Jordan (Kevin Pollak), one of those guys who always seems to have a cellular phone retrofitted inside his ear, ditches his pregnant wife (Barbara Garrick) for his business partner’s mate (Naomi Campbell, looking every inch the supermodel). Her mother, Nina (Mia Farrow), turns out to be carrying on with her grandmother’s male nurse, Antonio, a Cuban smoothie played by--who else?--Antonio Banderas. Her father, Vic (Paul Mazursky, in a fine, wry turn), who suspects his wife’s affair, is doing some dallying of his own with his travel agent (Kelly Bishop).

Gwyn is looking for any excuse not to marry and gets more than she bargained for. The most enjoyable moments in “Miami Rhapsody� are the ones in which the characters are dazed by their own libidos--Gwyn most of all. She even develops a hankering for her mother’s paramour, which brings the film into freaky-Freudian territory, but lightly so. Nina, in her scenes with Antonio, seems entranced by her own good fortune; it’s pretty clear she has no intention of leaving her husband for him but she can’t resist a momentary fantasia. It brings out her girlishness. Vic has the edgy, humbled uncomfortableness of a man who can’t reconcile his wife’s affair with his own. He feels bad about both.

Parker has never had this large a starring role, and she confirms her bright, addled, quicksilver gifts for comedy. She’s such a spirited performer that she elevates the sitcom Woodman material into something fluffier and funnier than it has any right to be. In her scenes with Farrow--who is lovely and who still carries her comic rhythms and intonations from her many Woody Allen films--both women really seem like mother and daughter. They have a familial coziness. It’s no wonder they’re drawn to the same man: He’s their joint dreamboat.

Frankel doesn’t really take this material very far into the kind of eccentric looniness that might have made it memorable. He sandbags the comedy by inserting strategic life lessons--the movie is intended as a learning experience for us as well as for the characters. Even though the movie’s collision of New York Jewish comic rhythms and sultry Miami Pop is promising, it never ignites. Frankel does well by his actors, though. He indulges their love of performing and they repay him threefold.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for sex-related plot material. Times guidelines: It includes mild sex and rampant infidelity.

‘Miami Rhapsody’ Sarah Jessica Parker: Gwyn Marcus Gil Bellows: Matt Mia Farrow: Nina Marcus Paul Mazursky: Vic Marcus A Buena Vista release of a Hollywood Pictures presentation. Director David Frankel. Producers Barry Jossen, David Frankel. Executive producers Jon Avnet, Jordan Kerner. Screenplay by David Frankel. Cinematographer Jack Wallner. Editor Steven Weisberg. Costumes Patricia Field. Music Mark Isham. Production design J. Mark Harrington. Set decorator Barbara Peterson. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

* In limited release in Southern California.