City of Angels.

Mr. Simon is NR's film critic.

SOMETIMES a film is so stupid as to be downright irresistible. When this happens, it is usually because the film has addressed a Big Topic with utmost banality, according to some tried and totally trite formula. Discerning people who have recently worked in Hollywood tell me I can't imagine the jejune benightedness of the current tycoons of Tinseltown. True: I can't imagine it. But watching their movies, I can see it.

Such a one is City of Angels, which easily equals -- perhaps even surpasses -- the preposterousness of previous films dealing with angels falling for mortals. The idea is old; it goes back at least to Alphonse de Lamartine's murky La Chute d'un ange (The Fall of an Angel, 1838), in which the angel Cedar falls in love with the maiden Daidha and defies God's wrath by assuming human form to win her. No good comes of it, and, after all sorts of dismal adventures, including their children's dying of thirst in the desert, Daidha dies. Cedar makes a funeral pyre for her and the children's bodies, then leaps into the flames himself. The spirit who scatters their ashes prophesies that the fallen angel will have to expiate his sin through nine incarnations.

One of these incarnations -- let's hope the last -- must be Nicolas Cage, who plays the angel Seth enamored of Meg Ryan's Dr. Maggie Rice, described in the press kit as "a pragmatic heart surgeon . . . deeply shaken by losing a patient on her table for no apparent reason." The nonapparent reason (which applies equally to the existence of this movie) is the need of the screenwriter, Dana Stevens, to get her scenario going. For standing by -- invisibly to humans -- is Seth, the angel charged with helping the dead patient into the Beyond. He is enacted by the unsightly and untalented Nick Cage, of whom I once wrote that Cage ought to be not his name, but his address.

Cage's improbable career is, in its way, exemplary. Being the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola can help even someone seemingly more related to Francis the talking mule, and it is Coppola who gave him his first film role in Rumble Fish. His specialty is playing jerks (as in Raising Arizona), falling-down drunks (as in Leaving Las Vegas), or various kinds of criminals. He excels at that dead-sheep look that some mistake for soulfulness, and that he uses a lot in City of Angels as he woos Meg Ryan. He also often speaks in an emotion-strangulated whisper that sounds like acute laryngitis. Altogether -- with his pointy ears, lymphatic regard, and equine countenance -- he suggests, in the throes of passion, a drayhorse on the way to the glue factory.

As the no-nonsense surgeon he falls for both physically and metaphysically, Meg Ryan is charming as ever, though rather unlike any cardiothoracist I have yet encountered. She understandably works up more feeling for Seth before he becomes visible to her, but they do have a brief but steamy time at Lake Tahoe, which John Seale shoots (as he does most of the movie) in misplaced bravura fashion. Warner Brothers has asked me not to divulge the ending, and so I can tell you only not to look for a conventionally happy one.

Los Angeles seems to be infested with angels, who often perch on road signs or rooftops and wear stylish, long-coated black outfits most likely from the Dolce & Gabbana boutique. One former angel, Nathaniel Messinger (Dennis Franz), actually finds bliss in marriage, parenthood, and gorging himself on high-cholesterol foods, but he is a roly-poly comic character. The main romance had to be a weeper, to conform to the mood of Dawn Steel, the co-producer, then dying of a tumor. Besides, that's what makes it art.

Dana Stevens's screenplay is a Hollywood travesty of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (itself fairly silly), which it purports to adapt. The plotting is paltry, the dialogue psychobabble, but the scriptwriter has done her research. She knows that "angel" comes from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger, hence the name Messinger. An angelic colleague of Seth's, played by the black actor Andre Braugher, whose forte is tough guys, is called Cassiel, which was indeed the name of one of the angel princes (sarim), sometimes known as the angel of temperance. Here he seems to be the angel of political correctness among the angelic host, who convene at dawn on the beach at Malibu for what looks like some bizarre New Age celebration.

I shall not catalogue the film's absurdities, but shall state that it tries valiantly not to offend anyone, including unbelievers. Its religiosity is strictly nondenominational. God is never mentioned, and Heaven is merely "the other side" but clearly not a bad place to be "living -- just not the way you think." Still, if the angels are as scurvy as Cage, as slobby as Franz, and as bald and bulging-eyed as Braugher, I'd rather find my way to the afterlife -- if any --without their company.