`FRIENDS' STAR CAN'T QUITE CARRY `PALLBEARER'.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Critic

It's hard to believe, but the lead role of Tom Thompson in ``The Pallbearer'' wasn't written for David Schwimmer, a star of the hit TV show ``Friends'' - in fact, first-time director Matt Reeves scarcely knew who Schwimmer was when the casting process began.

Yet Schwimmer, with his open-faced sweetness and hangdog expression, seems like the only actor who could have brought the naive, comically befuddled Tom to life, and he plays the boyish Gen-X character to the hilt.

Which isn't saying that the movie adds up to much.

A dark comedy written by Reeves and Jason Katims to capture the dilemmas of their fresh-out-of-college generation, ``The Pallbearer'' will inevitably draw comparisons to ``The Graduate.'' But whereas the 1967 hit's Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) felt immobilized by his antipathy toward the values of his parent's generation, Schwimmer's Tom Thompson is more like a puppy with his nose pressed up against the windowpane of life: He wants in; but he can't find any opportunities.

An architecture graduate who is mortified by the fact that he still lives at home with his eccentric mother (a very funny Carol Kane), Tom doggedly attends job interviews, at which he fails to make an impression.

So when he get a bizarre phone call from the distraught mother of an ex-classmate asking him to be a pallbearer at the guy's funeral, Tom accepts, if only because it will briefly give him a sense of purpose.

The problem - that he has no recollection of the guy - escalates when the boy's sultry, confused mother, Ruth (Barbara Hershey), asks Tom to give the eulogy. Tom stumbles through a nonsensical monologue (``Who was Bill Abernathy? Will we ever really know?'') while his friends snigger knowingly in the back pew.

Meanwhile, he has become obsessed with the sudden return of Julie DeMarco (Gwyneth Paltrow), a girl he adored in high school, who scarcely seems to remember him. Rejected by Julie, who is preoccupied with the idea that she needs to hit the road in a journey of self-discovery, Tom gives in to a seduction by the needy Ruth, and soon is entangled in a steamy affair with the older woman.

But unlike Mrs. Robinson, Ruth Abernathy is no adulterer from the corrupt establishment - she's merely a lonely character, as sad and adrift as her younger counterparts.

Director Reeves has a gift for visual storytelling and a promising comic sensibility with an emphasis on finding comedy in deeply uncomfortable circumstances.

But his unlikely premise doesn't take us anywhere very interesting, and he and co-writer Katims have an MTV-inspired penchant for cutting away from a scene just when it's warming up.

If the trend in contemporary, youth-slanted comedies is to create a minor furor, a la TV's ``Seinfeld,'' over neurotic trivialities, as this movie frequently does, the filmmakers could take a lesson from David O. Russell, who gets way more hilarity out of similar territory in the currently playing ``Flirting With Disaster,'' mainly because he swings for the fences and goes to unexpected places, whereas these guys have a tendency to back off or opt for the familiar.

To their credit, they've created a diverting comedy that poignantly explores that floundering feeling you get when you graduate from college and the world isn't waiting. ``I'm lost, I'm completely lost. I don't know what I'm doing with my life!'' a distraught Julie tells her wealthy parents, and that may just tap the zeitgeist for an in-between generation.

But there's nothing here that's compelling enough to galvanize the 20-somethings. And Schwimmer, who was allowed to overindulge his boyish schtick, will need to come up with something new next time out.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The Pallbearer'' (PG-13; sexuality).

The stars: David Schwimmer, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Rapaport, Toni Collette, Carol Kane, Bitty Schram, Barbara Hershey.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Matt Reeves. Written by Jason Katims and Matt Reeves. Produced by Jeffrey Abrams and Paul Webster. Released by Miramax Films.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Julie De Marco (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Tom Thompson (D avid Schwimmer) ride a Coney Island roller coaster while they attempt to get their post-college lives going in the ``The Pallbearer.''