Bounce Movie Trailer. Don Roos’s ultra-sleek romantic drama ”Bounce” is a perfect illustration of the adage that God is in the details. Although its aspirations aren’t much loftier than to meet the specifications of what might be called High Formula Hollywood moviemaking, this touching, finely wrought bowl of suds is a seamless piece of work, comparable in its craft to ”Jerry Maguire” and ”As Good as It Gets,” if a bit slighter.
The film’s two stars, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck, emerge from the movie as the most soulful (if not the most torrid) romantic coupling to animate a Hollywood film in quite some time. As their characters tiptoe warily into each other’s hearts, the cross-currents of longing and anxiety rippling through their faces tell us exactly how much is at stake.
For a change, it isn’t simply a matter of will they or won’t they end up in bed together but of whether these two complicated, strong-willed individuals can summon the courage to commit themselves to a serious relationship. It has been ages since a Hollywood screen couple, gazing into each other’s eyes, conveyed this much emotion.
As Abby Janello, the widowed mother of two young boys, Ms. Paltrow gives a performance of astounding delicacy and depth. Her tiniest, seemingly throwaway gestures and slightest changes of expression have the transparency of great screen acting on a miniature scale. She is also utterly convincing as a harried, caring mother of two.
Playing Buddy Amaral, a swaggering, gregarious advertising executive recovering from alcoholism, Mr. Affleck nearly matches Ms. Paltrow in the understated intensity and exquisite detail of his performance. More than once in the movie, his eyes tear up. But this actor, with his beseeching hound dog look and trembling lower lip, never becomes mawkish. His portrait of a young, sarcastically self-defined ”people person” who isn’t half as confident as he would like to appear is close to definitive.
”Bounce” isn’t anywhere near as nervy as ”The Opposite of Sex,” the film that put Mr. Roos on the map as a fast-rising director and screenwriter. In its conventional, largely predictable story of commitment wariness among contemporary yuppies, you can feel the screenplay’s gears churning and time the beats of its dialogue. Late in the movie, when Abby delivers the speech from which ”Bounce” takes it title, it feels almost too neat. And a running joke about the meaning of the word ”dooryard” (from Whitman) is repeated one too many times.
But this carefully nurtured sense of snugness is also what High Formula movie-making is all about. What’s remarkable about the screenplay and the calculated, somewhat far-fetched plot is the dexterity with which Mr. Roos avoids small cliches to reinvigorate a larger one.
In its texture, its eye for detail, and language, ”Bounce” offers an extremely accurate portrait of the style and mood of the yuppie class in this country right now. For all the emotions on display, it’s a slightly chilly portrait.
The opening scenes in an airport perfectly capture the pent-up frantic experience of contemporary air travel. And the scenes in the advertising agency where Buddy is a high-flying partner in charge of the Infinity Airline account precisely calibrate the nerve-racking mixture of cynicism, bravado, creativity, defensiveness and public relations savvy in his cutthroat world. Later scenes of fast-talking real estate negotiations display a similar hard-edged knowingness.
What spins the story into motion is Buddy’s last-minute decision to give his plane ticket (on an Infinity flight) to a young Los Angeles writer he meets casually while held up by a snowstorm at O’Hare. The stranger, Greg Janello (Tony Goldwyn) is eager to return to his family in Los Angeles, while Buddy in giving up his ticket frees himself for an overnight fling with a pretty Dallas businesswoman.
But when the plane crashes in Kansas, killing more than 200, including Greg, Buddy is guilt-stricken, and his drinking soon crosses the line into alcoholism. After embarrassing himself at an awards ceremony for his contributions to a saccharine Infinity Airlines ad, he checks into a rehab.
The story skips ahead a year. Buddy has dried out but is still shaky inside. As part of his 12-step atonement, he pays a visit to Greg’s widow, Abby, not telling her of his connection to her dead husband. She’s now a novice real estate agent, and he connives to help her make a deal for the purchase of his own company’s new quarters. Attracted to Buddy, Abby, who says she is divorced, hesitantly initiates a dating relationship. As it turns more serious, the inevitable, increasingly scary question looms of how and when Buddy will tell her the truth.
Directing his own screenplay, Mr. Roos displays the same brilliant restraint that Kenneth Lonergan shows in ”You Can Count on Me,” another ultra-realistic film that shares this movie’s aversion to gratuitous melodrama. When Abby is informed of Greg’s death, for instance, the camera pulls away to observe her reactions from afar, and its lack of proximity makes the far-off vision of her sudden flailing grief all the more wrenching. The movie completely omits the drama of Buddy’s rehabilitation. Instead of zeroing in on its characters’ heated confrontations, in most cases it prefers to show their aftermath.
Enriching the film are some expertly fleshed-out minor characters, notably Buddy’s hardnosed boss (Joe Morton) and his cheeky gay assistant (Johnny Galecki), a 12-step graduate who minces no words. If David Dorfman and Alex D. Linz as Abby’s young sons are a little too Hollywood-cute for comfort, at least they’re not gratingly so.
”Bounce” may be far from a great film, but its pleasures are consistent enough to remind you of how few movies nowadays come anywhere close to matching it in intelligence and emotional balance. It is not only a terrific date movie, but also one that doesn’t make you feel ashamed afterward for getting misty-eyed.
Bounce (2000)
Directed by: Don Roos
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow, Natasha Henstridge, Edward Edwards, Jennifer Grey, Tony Goldwyn, Lisa Carpenter-Prewitt, Lisa Joyner, Caroline Aaron, Mary Ellen Lyon
Screenplay by: Don Roos
Production Design by: David Wasco
Cinematography by: Robert Elswit
Film Editing by: David Codron
Costume Design by: Peter Mitchell
Set Decoration by: Sandy Reynolds-Wasco
Art Direction by: Daniel Bradford
Music by: Mychael Danna, Dean Landon
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and sensuality.
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: November 17, 2000
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