'RUMOR' MANY DEGREES APART FROM 'GRADUATE'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'RUMOR HAS IT ...'' is a slight movie in-joke in search of a feature-length reason to exist. It's never found.

There's a handful of charming passages, all of which involve a slyly smooth Kevin Costner in his second tasty yeoman performance of the year. Costner's first one was in the far more interesting ``The Upside of Anger.'' And that movie wasn't all that interesting.

It sure beat this idea, though. Jennifer Aniston plays an upscale Pasadena gal, Sarah Huttinger, who gets wind that her mom and grandmother were the models for the Robinsons in the novel, and later the movie, ``The Graduate.'' Mother passed away long ago, but Sarah's hard-drinking, trash-mouthed Grandma Katharine (Shirley MacLaine, on hard-drinking, trash-mouth autopilot) lets the cat out of the bag.

Both a journalist and someone who has never felt like she fit in with her family, Sarah goes into compulsive investigation mode. She tracks down Costner's Beau Burroughs, now an insanely wealthy dot-com entrepreneur. He doesn't look or act like Dustin Hoffman, but Sarah is still pretty worried that Beau might be her actual father. When he convinces her that he isn't, matters really become complicated.

The film is set in 1997, mainly so Aniston's character can be in her mid-30s, which is something of a plot point. Sarah is also engaged to a nice guy (Mark Ruffalo) she isn't sure she wants to settle down with - a congenital condition, apparently, for women in her family. Commitment-phobia is also related to her abhorrence of the slightly conservative, upper-middle- class lifestyle her Pasadena kin enjoy. Only a rich Beverly Hills type like director Rob Reiner would consider such an environment even remotely oppressive.

But, for a change, Reiner can't be blamed for the smug, bloodless romantic humor ``Rumor'' traffics in. The ``Story of Us'' filmmaker was a hired gun on this one, brought in when screenwriter T.M. Griffin (the remake of ``Ocean's Eleven'') got bounced out of the director's chair - amid a flurry of much juicier rumors than any in his screenplay - a few weeks into production.

Whatever really happened to Griffin, it's doubtful that any director could have drawn much worth watching out of his wispy concept. Which I guess makes Reiner, who's long past his ``When Harry Met Sally ...'' heyday, a perfect choice. But that's the only thing you can consider remotely perfect about ``Rumor Has It ...''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

RUMOR HAS IT ... - Two stars

(PG-13: sex, language, drug use)

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Ruffalo, Richard Jenkins, Mena Suvari.

Director: Rob Reiner.

Running time: 1 hr. 37 min.

Playing: Opens Sunday in wide release.

In a nutshell: Thin premise involves a young woman discovering that her family was the real-life model for ``The Graduate's'' Robinsons. Not as good as ``The Graduate,'' to put it mildly. Not even in the same comic league. Or universe.

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Jennifer Aniston investigates her female relatives' bed-hopping past in Rob Reiner's bloodless ``Rumor Has It ...''