A Bad 'Day' for Fathers

Oh dads, poor dads, this movie keeps you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad.

A lamebrained American remake of the classic, bitter French farce "Les Comperes," "Fathers' Day" offers sporadic laughs of the lowest kind -- the old outhouse-bites-man thing -- but some conspicuous idiocy as well.

Its most foolish notion is to acquire two great comic presences and lock them in a plot so rigid they can't begin to do what made them stars. Robin Williams sometimes speaks as if in the tongues of the gods of pure ethereal laughter: Insane improvisations rip from his lips in a torrent of noises and gurgles while faces from the id flash across his own rather bland phiz. He's clearly beamed down from the planet of the really funny guys. But he's so roped in by the concept here he never really cracks loose. You don't go to a Robin Williams movie to watch him read lines and advance the plot.

And you don't go to a Billy Crystal movie to see him butt heads. There are higher Crystal pleasures -- his quickness with an ad lib, his incredible gift at mimicry, his deadpan pro's timing -- and in this movie what he does, mainly, is crack his forehead into other people's foreheads. Why? The only answer is that his French antecedent, Gerard Depardieu, did so in the original. But Depardieu was nasty, brutish and tall. Crystal is tasty, cutish and short. So when he head-butts an adversary, it seems to come from nowhere.

Conceptually, at least, the film is another item from the clever mind of Francis Veber, the professional farceur who roams the untamed frontier between straight and gay cultures and whose most successful cross-border raid was "La Cage aux Folles," called "The Birdcage" in its less convincing American incarceration. Veber boasts a true gift for comic construction, the professional management of mixed identities, wrong doors and misinformation. But the director is the literalist Ivan Reitman -- inspired in "Ghostbusters" and on autopilot ever since. He doesn't reinterpret, he merely repeats, as in the unfortunate head-butt business. So the movie is never as inspired as its stars, and they are never as inspired as they were on "The Tonight Show" on Tuesday, when they were the script.

Clever setup: A woman from their past -- in this case the vague Nastassja Kinski -- comes separately to two childless men and says that her 17-year-old son is missing, that, furthermore, it may be their son, too. Discovering a certain procreational warmth otherwise missing from lives given, respectively, to success (Crystal is a lawyer) and failure (Williams is an unpublished writer), they set out, apart, to find the boy.

As they go, they discover each other, and team up, each secretly hoping the boy is his; but they also discover truths not merely about the past, but about the present, too -- mainly themselves. Crystal, after Depardieu, is hyper-masculine, a true hunter-predator; Williams, after Pierre Richard, is a weepier, New Age kind of guy, into his feelings. They are like high priests of competing male cults who come, after initial suspicion and hostility, to see the validity in the other's way of living.

But this film can't quite capitalize on the genius of Veber's concept. Instead, it always goes for the cheap laugh over the real feeling. It adds a whole subplot with poor square Bruce Greenwood as another candidate for fatherhood, and it contrives to lock him in an port-a-pot and launch him down the hills and over the dales of Southern California. Splish, splash, he's taking a bath, but this plot goes nowhere except into a high state of hygiene anxiety; it never connects with the adventures of Williams and Crystal.

Those adventures are pretty cheap, too. When he runs out of ideas, Veber -- Reitman enthusiastically concurs, as abetted by old pro comedy writers Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz -- likes to put his straight guys in compromising situations so that onlookers will suspect they are gay; he does this twice, and the returns are ever diminishing, even when the astonished Julia-Louis Dreyfus, as Crystal's wife, is the onlooker. Meanwhile, when they're not evading obsolete gay stereotypes, our heroes are pursuing the creepy kid (Charlie Hofheimer) and his creepy girlfriend through a pretty creepy milieu -- big-time, drug-infested punk rockdom.

The movie is too sentimentalized to be truly funny. It doesn't dare divide Crystal and Williams the way Veber divided Depardieu and Richard -- along the lines of masculine body language and its opposite, which is not feminine, but effeminate body language. The brilliant French movie played with relationships between the two species of males who cohabit this planet, and the subject isn't crossing dress codes but crossing legs: the ankle-on-knee school versus the thigh-on-thigh school. The American version doesn't really know the difference.

Fathers' Day is rated PG-13 for sexual innuendo.