A PRAYERFUL TRIO : 'Keeping the Faith,' 'The Virgin Suicides,' & 'Gladiator'.

It would be impossible not to be entertained and amused by Keeping the Faith, a good-natured romantic comedy set on New York City's (suspiciously) sparkling Upper West Side. (My teenage daughter has seen it twice.) First-time director Edward Norton, an actor best known for playing intense young toughs (American History X), shows a real feel for this venerable genre as well as a sweet tooth for glossy cityscapes. Norton does not set an easy task for himself in building this story around that most benighted of God's creatures, the "hip" clergyman. But he pulls it off. You laugh, and you are even touched by the scavenger hunt for love that takes us up and down the resplendent isle of Manhattan.

Casting himself as sweet-tempered Father Brian, the curate at a mostly Hispanic Catholic parish, Norton goes to admirable lengths to capture a sense of churchy verisimilitude, right down to an unguided thurible and a gruff, Slavic-accented pastor (Milos Forman). Ben Stiller (There's Something about Mary) plays Brian's best friend Jake, a promising young rabbi who has brought energy and young people to a nearby Conservative congregation. The two have been friends since elementary school, where they forged a bond with the pretty and commanding tomboy, Anna Reilly. Anna, played as an adult by the lithe and girlish Jenna Elfman (of TV's "Dharma and Greg"), breaks up the young trio by moving to California. Twenty years later she reenters the picture, setting the inevitable romantic crisis in motion, as the giddiest and longest-limbed corporate whiz kid in Manhattan.

Little in Keeping the Faith surprises. This is a sentimental film that moves deftly through a series of set comic pieces. Norton is a very appealing presence, but Stiller is given the bulk of the assignments and pulls them off with little fuss. As an unmarried young rabbi, he is the object of fevered scrutiny and solicitation. When not fending off eligible young women, Rabbi Jake shepherds the prototypically pudgy, annoying, and inept bar mitzvah candidate through his paces. Meanwhile, the congregation's elders, exasperated by Jake's unorthodox style, are anxious to oust him.

Stiller is aided in these high jinks by the presence of Eli Wallach and Anne Bancroft. Wallach shuffles through the picture as a sage-like rabbinical mentor. Bancroft plays Jake's very imposing Jewish mother. Both ham it up mercilessly, with Wallach exuding gravitas and Bancroft showing how none of the steel in her voice or gaze has softened since her days as Mrs. Robinson.

As a showman, Father Brian is a white-bread version of Jake, with his own brand of convivial patter and user-friendly theology. Brian is supposed to be a spectacular klutz. Norton throws himself into the pratfalls, but he lacks the nervous energy of a Woody Allen or a Peter Sellers that would make the slapstick a natural extension of Father Brian's personality. Norton is just too comfortable in his own skin to come off as a clown, let alone a fool for God.

Anna's return does, however, bring real chaos into Father Brian's emotional life. But while Brian torments himself about his new-found feelings, Anna and Jake take action, embarking on a clandestine romance that seems destined for disaster. Love and laughter, of course, triumph.

There are some inspired, wonderfully silly moments in this movie, especially the manic spiel of a music-store salesman trying to sell a karaoke machine, and an Indian bartender who listens incredulously to Father Brian's drunken confession of how his best friend, the rabbi, stole his girl. Every ethnic stereotype imaginable is trotted out to be at once confirmed and upended with good humor.

Only a grinch would cavil about the way Norton treats religion. Still, Keeping the Faith's idea of faith is a bit like Donald Trump's idea of politics. It's mostly self-referential, if not self-reverential. Brian and Jake are granted their "callings," but who or what is calling them remains almost unspoken. The "faith" that is kept, despite all the authentic paraphernalia on the screen, is little more than a belief in common decency. There is no sense of a presence that is radically other, of a "calling" that would make Brian's celibacy or Jake's doubts about mixed marriage anything but curious historical accidents. The only thing that comes close to evoking a mystery is Anna's cabalistic language of high finance, which inspires the awe and incomprehension of both clergymen. It's a joke, of course, but an interesting displacement of that most basic of religious instincts.

Mystery suffuses Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides. Equal parts tone poem, dark fairy tale, and suburban coming-of-age satire, the novel leaves an indelible impression. For anyone who grew up in a well-to-do suburb, the book captured the seemingly infinite suspension of "real" life that characterizes a certain kind of American childhood. As the title suggests, there was also a skein of religious sentiment--holy cards, statues of the BVM, and whatnot--in the macabre story of how the five pretty Lisbon sisters, brought up as strict Catholics, came to end their own lives. A strange and even haunting book, The Virgin Suicides had a shrewd sense of the discrepancy between what we think we know about the lives of our neighbors and what those lives are actually like. Whenever the reader was tempted to reach for a tidy explanation, Eugenides offered complexity and uncertainty.

First-time director/writer Sofia Coppola (daughter of Francis Ford Coppola) gets most of the novel's "facts" right, but its mood and enigmatic point of view elude her. Admittedly, the horror of five suicides is easier to stomach on the page than to look at on the screen. Coppola deflects the grisly subtext by turning a satirical eye to the gruesome dating rituals of adolescence. She has some success here, especially in the depiction of the perfectly named Trip Fontaine, the preternaturally cool high school glamour boy whose pursuit of the beautiful Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) propels the Lisbon household toward disaster. Equally well cast is James Woods, who walks through the movie like a shell shock victim after the inexplicable suicide of his youngest daughter, Cecilia. As his wife, Kathleen Turner does one of her practiced turns as a deviously maniacal suburban matron. Coppola puts the Lisbons' sexual Puritanism center stage, forcing the arc of the story toward a predictable juxtaposition of repression and release. The novel was never so reductionistic.

There are other problems. The identity of the film's voiceover narrator is never adequately established, and this proves distracting. More important, the movie ignores one of the novel's great characters: the Lisbons' house. Like Miss Haversham's cake and wedding dress, things in the Lisbon house are untouched after the death of Cecilia. Its inexorable deterioration, in the midst of the neighborhood's meticulously maintained properties, is the very embodiment of the family's tortured soul. Why such a powerful visual idea was left on the page is hard to imagine.

"Little by little, people ceased to discuss the mystery of Cecilia's suicide," the novel tells us, "preferring to see it as inevitable, or as something best left behind." Eugenides conjured up that mystery, letting it deepen and complicate the commonplace absurdities and longings of adolescent life. This movie aims to evoke the same mystery, but settles for a sense of blank perplexity.

Gladiator, the first big movie of the summer season, is a tasty bit of celluloid confection that boasts the greatest number of decapitations since Anne of the Thousand Days, and the best chariot demolitions since Ben Hur. This is newfangled "epic" moviemaking of the old-fashioned "sword and sandal" school. Spartacus, The Silver Chalice, of course Ben Hur, and Samson and Delilah are some of the canonical works in this once popular genre. Gladiator, in fact, is something of a remake of 1964's The Fall of the Roman Empire, but with all the advantages of computerized graphics and modern body-building techniques. I suppose it's good to know that the technology that gave us Star Wars can also be applied to the cruder cutlery and catapults of the Roman legions and the barbarian hordes. And pagan Rome has never looked so, well, monumental. As the ill-fated Roman General Maximus (the year is a.d. 180), Russell Crowe (L.A. Confidential) mesmerizes. Betrayed by his superiors and sold into slavery, Maximus ends up fighting for his life and the hope of revenge as a gladiator. This is definitely the guy you want on your side in any arena. Crowe has the presence and physical authority of a Kirk Douglas and the ironic twinkle in his eye of fellow Australian, Mel Gibson. Director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) places his action hero in the middle of a succession of terrific battle sequences, and Crowe walks away with all the laurels as well as the stray limbs of his opponents. The late Oliver Reed makes a memorably operatic appearance as a provincial gladiatorial promoter who rides Maximus's prowess to the big time, the Colosseum in Rome.

Gladiator is a boys' story, and its hero an anomalous cross between the Lone Ranger and Cincinnatus. Quaint tributes to pagan piety and speculation about the afterlife are offered as relief from the remorseless bloodshed and treachery. Crowe's entry into the pantheon of movie gods, however, will be Gladiator's most lasting legacy.

Paul Baumann is Commonweal's executive editor.