Good clean fun, damn it

>> Ed Norton's Keeping the Faith will offend no one

By JOANNE LATIMER

What you already know from the trailers is that Keeping the Faith is about a rabbi and a priest who fall for the same girl. Ed Norton directs and plays the priest, while Ben Stiller plays his boyhood friend, who grows up to be the rabbi. What you might not want to know is that Norton has made an innocuous romantic comedy that's low on sacrilege. Keeping the Faith offends no one--when has that ever made for a good film about religion?

The story never spirals into absurdity--damn it--nor does it bound off into shocking terrain. Expectations for something more seditious come attached with Norton himself, perhaps, and his anti-hero status. Who would've thought he'd make his directorial debut doing mainstream gags? I preferred watching Norton when he was bottom- feeding at other people's A.A. meetings and making soap from liposuctioned fat in Fight Club.

Maybe Keeping the Faith is winking in the direction of Fight Club in its opening scenes, when a drunk Father Finn (Norton) is stumbling around the streets of Manhattan and falling into piles of garbage. The good Father has a dark secret, of course, but it's not really dirty and we can tell from the lilt in his voice-over that he never seriously stains his robes.

"She was a cross between Tatum O'Neal in Little Foxes and Johnny Quest," says Father Finn, describing his childhood friend, Anna Reilly, played by Jenna Elfman (what is it with guys in their thirties and Tatum O'Neal?). Rabbi Jake also has a boner for Anna, but doesn't want to destroy his mother (Anne Bancroft) by dating a non-Jew. Jake is the most eligible bachelor at his synagogue, and the film's best moments are about reluctant dates.

Norton spends too much footage establishing the rabbi and the priest as hip holy men. They play basketball, they wear leather coats, they jog, they like music and they're rebels in their respective fields. As if we didn't get it, he actually says, "We want to kick the dust off our religions." Someone refers to them as The God Squad and we're supposed to think, "Yeah, the God Squad!"

Like the rest of the film, the joke doesn't quite work.

Keeping the Faith opens Friday, April 14