‘Cousins’ By Rita Kempley Washington Post Staff Writer February 10, 1989

Director: Joel Schumacher Cast: Ted Danson; Isabella Rossellini; Sean Young; William L. Petersen; Lloyd Bridges; Norma Aleandro; Keith Coogan Children under 13 should be accompanied by a parent Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

"Cousins," based on France's "Cousin, Cousine," becomes an ethnic American valentine of earthy Poles and smoochy Italians, families united in the first of the movie's three marriages. A June-struck affair, the story is structured around these extended-family gatherings.

Rossellini, as Maria Hardy, becomes the kissing cousin of Ted Danson, as Larry Kozinski, when her mother marries his uncle. Both straight arrows, they are cuckolded at the wedding party by his wife Tish (Sean Young) and her husband Tom (William Petersen). The only time Larry cheated on his wife was while playing Monopoly, and Maria, though she knows of her husband's infidelities, remains faithful to the heel.

Larry and Maria exact gentle revenge by pretending to have their own affair, but they fall in love along the way. Danson, oozing with infantile charm, and Rossellini, her beauty humanized by a Bugs Bunny smile, enjoy an improbable sweethearts' repartee. Young and Petersen are slam-bam, lust personified.

A subplot finds Maria's mother Edie (Norma Aleandro) widowed almost immediately and pursued by Larry's ebullient father Vince (Lloyd Bridges), while Larry's teen-age son (Keith Coogan) is bitten by the puppy-love bug. The entire company -- including whole families of extras -- are soon head over heels in amore, or as they say in Poland, miolosc.

Nevertheless "Cousins" (though filmed in Vancouver by Americans) remains as French as the fizz in a Perrier. A leisurely country picnic of a movie, it is a bourgeois lesson in the do's and don'ts of true love and family ties. Unfortunately, director Joel Schumacher's Americanization is sometimes vulgar. In the movie's preamble, for instance, the bridegroom, a garbage tycoon, moons the wedding party, commenting, "Kiss me where the sun don't shine." There is nothing quite like the sight of a 60-year-old's rosy cheeks to leave one moonstruck.

Mostly Stephen Metcalfe's adapted screenplay succeeds with its burlesque belly laughs, complementing the lyrical affair of the lead pair. As the boisterous grandpop, Bridges steals many a scene with Metcalfe's raunchy repartee. "I'd rather have a case of the clap than a case of this," he tells Maria's husband, who is praising a carafe of house wine.

Schumacher, whose last film was the "The Lost Boys," avoids the cloying pitfalls of the bonbon genre in this unexpected transition from cult to commercial films. He is aided by his excellent cast, the evocative landscapes and the affectionate Gallic score of Angelo Badalamenti.

Cute youngsters, cute oldsters and wedding belles make "Cousins" a movie to love, honor and cherish, to some degree anyway.

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