If you've ever complained that they don't make melodramas the way they used to, you bear some karmic responsibility for this weepy, overwrought love story. When wealthy, middle-aged womanizer Will Keane (Richard Gere) spots Charlotte (Winona Ryder)
celebrating her 22nd birthday in his chi-chi Manhattan eatery, he envisions nothing more than another notch on the bedpost. Will turns on the silver-haired charm, complements the ridiculous hats Charlotte fashions from pipe cleaners and bits of folded paper (her primary inspiration seems to be Dr.
Seuss drawings) and whisks her away to a charity gala in a fairy-tale satin gown. The morning after this magical first date, he starts delivering an obviously well-rehearsed kiss-off speech. But Charlotte trumps him with the news that she's dying from old movie disease (OK, she has a
neuroblastoma, but it amounts to the same thing), which is in no way spoiling any top-secret plot twist since it's revealed so early and drives every subsequent dramatic development. On the plus side, director Joan Chen captures a genuinely enchanted New York, glittering with Chinese lanterns and
Christmas lights, and in a mere handful of scenes, Elaine Stritch delivers an affecting performance as Charlotte's embittered, once-wealthy grandmother (whose fabulous Greenwich Village townhouse would do a lot to lift most people's gloom). Newcomer Vera Farmiga, as the illegitimate daughter Will
has never bothered to make part of his life, makes something very close to gold out of her brittle scenes with Gere. The trouble lies with the leads: Gere's dominant mode is petulant smugness, Ryder's waiflike charm is well past its sell-by date, and if they're not the most charmless doomed lovers
of all time they come damned close. Their utter lack of romantic chemistry leaves a hole in this tear-jerker's heart that nothing can fill. --Maitland McDonagh
