Hope Floats

Director Forest Whitaker's (Waiting to Exhale) latest opens promisingly enough, with a clever sequence in which a devastated housewife (Sandra Bullock) learns on a nationally televised talk show that her husband is having an affair with her best friend. The balance of the film follows Bullock as she and her young daughter (the very impressive Mae Whitman) return to her small Texas hometown to lick their wounds. And it might have worked if it had explored its unique premise--an emotionally damaged woman surrounded by people who knew her as a teen beauty queen, and probably revel in her misery--for all its dramatic and comedic possibilities. Instead, Hope Floats focuses on Bullock's plastic relationship with Harry Connick Jr. (playing the Nice Guy with such obvious puppy dog likeabilty that there's never a moment's tension in their romance). Bullock, meanwhile, doesn't act her part so much as smile it, constantly, in every possible context, to display every possible emotion. At least a fair amount of time is spent on Whitman and Cameron Finley (as Bullock's abandoned, fantasy-world-dwelling nephew). It's infinitely more involving watching two children respond to absentee parents than watching Bullock's mundane and inevitable trip to "finding herself." Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)