Love and other catastrophes

>> Don Roos on Paltrow, Affleck and his sublime melodrama Bounce

by MATTHEW HAYS

Bounce feels like a bit of an odd film. Odd because it's a romantic melodrama that's not the least bit ironic nor schmaltzy. No, there are no cheap gags, no subverting of its sincerity with undercutting one-liners. This is the real thing, a sincerely, beautifully acted love story starring former item Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck.

But perhaps even odder is where Bounce came from. This film is the product of Don Roos, whose '98 entry The Opposite of Sex proved an arthouse hit and a critical sensation. Though not devoid of caring, sensitive moments, Sex was punctuated with an acidic, biting and cynical voiceover by its protagonist, Christina Ricci. Roos' scathing wit and irreverent take on relationships won over audiences. Thus it might seem he would think twice before breaking the mould and going "serious." But here he is, doing just that.

"This was a much, much more difficult film," says Roos, from his L.A. office. "Cynicism is easy to play. In The Opposite of Sex, I was cheating in a sense because I had Christina's voiceover, which was really my voice as director. Any time things got serious I could pull back and allow for some laughs, which was really a way to distance people. With Bounce, I'm far more transparent as director and it's much more difficult, letting the characters come forward themselves."

Dire disasters

Bounce certainly has a rather severe predicament at the centre of its plot. Affleck plays an ad exec with a lusty appetite for both booze and women. Stopping over in an airport one night, he meets up with a couple of other travellers whose flights have been delayed. When Affleck picks up a cute blonde, he offers his replacement ticket to the fellow he's met in the airport bar (Tony Goldwyn). The flight Goldwyn boards turns out to be doomed to crash, and his widow turns out to be none other than Paltrow.

Consumed with guilt about the flight and what could have been, Affleck increasingly drowns his sorrows in alcohol, landing in rehab. As part of recovery, he decides to face his main inner demon, that of the family left husband- and fatherless after the crash. As the logic of the old-fashioned melodrama would have it, he and Paltrow fall in love, while he finds it difficult to know exactly how to explain their connection to her.

Isolated from irony

With its elements of tragedy, fate, substance abuse, chance romance and redemption, Bounce feels something like a Douglas Sirk melodrama for the 21st century--a compliment of the highest order, and perhaps a bit of a surprise, coming from Roos, who used to screenwrite such schlock as the Dynasty spinoff The Colbys and the feature Single White Female. "As a director, it's important to keep things fresh. I thought a lot about Noel Coward with this film. He had become so famous for his ironic wit, but then turned around and wrote Brief Encounter, which was a very sincere and lovely story."

Roos confirms that Paltrow and Affleck's connection prior to filming helped them to create a solid onscreen chemistry. "Actually, I didn't even know they'd been a couple," Roos says, sincerely. "It's weird, because I'm a big fan of the tabloids, but I guess I was doing something else that year. We started shooting and I was like, 'Have you guys ever dated?' And they were like, 'Yeah, you idiot, we were an item for a year.'"

After The Opposite of Sex, which featured characters who inhabited the entire spectrum of the Kinsey scale, the out gay Roos says he was offered "every gay screenplay imaginable." But he wrote Bounce, which has one supporting gay character but is a het romance. "I really don't demarcate--I have friends who are straight, gay, bi. Frankly, I have more problems with sex than sexual orientation. Sex is very bizarre itself. The fact that we have such a deep connection to this primitive biological force, I find fascinating. People don't really talk about how strange sex is. It's this thing that drives our lives, but no one has a handle on it."

Bounce opens Friday, Nov. 17