A Smile Like Yours

A plot synopsis for A Smile Like Yours reads like the most generic of bittersweet romantic comedies: a happily married young couple (Greg Kinnear and Lauren Holly) face kooky complications and tensions when they decide it's time for baby to make three. Sounds quite a bit like She's Having a Baby, doesn't it? Only it's more like She's Not Having a Baby, because A Smile Like Yours is a bittersweet romantic comedy about infertility. That's right, all the wacky hijinks of providing semen samples! All the side-splitting humor of spending an hour in stirrups! All the unbridled hilarity of small-talk with other clinic patients involving pelvic inflammatory disease! I can understand the urge to search for humor in a subject as frustrating, embarrassing and occasionally guilt-inducing as fertility problems. And it might have worked if there had been a single honest moment to counteract the leaden farce. Instead, the filmmakers merely graft a few scenes at a fertility clinic onto a fluffy and absurdly predictable relationship comedy, which could just as easily have been about a couple struggling with financial problems, or an irritating relative, or the heartbreak of psoriasis. A Smile Like Yours achieves an almost impressive level of generic monotony, from the casting to the set-up for a heart-tugging climax. You know you're in trouble when the biggest laugh in a film comes during a scene when a character is watching a rerun of I Love Lucy, which is still funnier and more inventive after 40 years than A Smile Like Yours is after 40 minutes. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)