DREADED BLISS : 'Heartbreakers' & 'The Brothers'.

I recently went to two top-grossing new releases for a dose of marriage, money, and morals, Hollywood style. Maybe we're supposed to be relaxing after the high seriousness of the Oscar season. Or maybe it's just that times are flush, and that means comedy.

Heartbreakers follows the exploits of a mother-daughter scam duo specializing in connubial con jobs. The film opens in a lavish church, with Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Dean (Ray Liotta) exchanging vows amid mountains of flowers and the solemn strains of "Ave Maria." Ray Liotta in church means either (a) mob drama or (b) screwball comedy, and with nary a casket or smirking hit man in sight, we're pretty sure it's (b). At the wedding party afterward, Max tortures her amorous bridegroom by dancing with every man in the room, making him wait and wait. At long last he manages to carry her off to the honeymoon suite, where she pops off her dress to reveal lace underwear, teasing him to a frothing desire--then promptly falls asleep. What's a simple guy from Jersey to do?

Actually, Dean is a kind of scamp himself (he runs an automobile chop shop), but alas, he's facing a pair of crooks more devious, and infinitely smarter, than he is. That sassy young office temp he hired a few weeks ago? Little does he know she's actually Max's daughter, Paige (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and when the very next morning she offers relief for his pent-up need--in Heartbreakers, short skirts and low necklines reliably vaporize male scruples--poor Dean barely has himself unzipped when...in walks Max. Outrage and lawyers follow swiftly, and before Dean can say, "I've been had," he's out $300,000 (cash, thank you) and one Mercedes. "How was the wedding, Mom?" Paige asks, as the two power away in the Benz. "Beautiful," says Mom, "like all my weddings." Then it's merrily on to Palm Beach and their next mark, an elderly, bellicose tobacco tycoon (Gene Hackman) who's busily smoking himself to death. Will Max manage to snag him, and Paige seduce him, before he keels over?

Heartbreakers is anything but subtle. Scene after scene showcases Hackman's spasmodic coughing, bilious pallor, and repulsive gray teeth ("I have to kiss that?" Paige complains), while in the background his pet parrot keels over from second-hand smoke. Characterization is achieved mostly by clothing: Hackman, foolish in purple underwear, lime green socks, and garters; Jack, Paige's sweet-souled wannabe boyfriend (Jason Lee), sincere in loose jeans and T-shirt; Weaver, posing as a Russian femme fatale in dominatrix black leather; and, at every turn, the mesmerizing prospect of Hewitt's push-up bra. The movie's soundtrack mixes silky bossa nova with a romping comic theme (by Danny Elfman, whose vaguely demented music graced Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and the Pee Wee Herman movies). It's all light fluff, and it skips along nicely, a hit-or-miss satire that lands the occasional bull's-eye of weirdness, for instance, when Hackman rhapsodizes, "There's nothing sexier than smoke billowing proudly out of a woman's hot, red, engorged nostrils."

My chief gripe isn't that Heartbreakers isn't serious enough, but that it's too serious. What motivates Max's cynical scamming, it turns out, is concern for Paige--that she'll fall in love, and heartache will follow, as it did for Max years before. Director David Mirkin and his trio of screenwriters don't trust their film's breezy amorality; they want it to have a heart of gold.

In a recent New Yorker essay, Anthony Lane wrote that comedy in American movies "has shriveled into a prelude to sincerity: something to be hustled out of the way, almost with embarrassment, to allow warm feelings in." A final twist to Heartbreakers preserves some measure of fun, but the ending is mostly about following the truth of your heart and learning to love. Sure, we all know comedy ends with everyone getting married, but do they all have to be healed as well? Heartbreakers takes a promisingly nasty falling-out among thieves and turns it into family therapy. All mother and daughter really needed, it seems, was love. That's the biggest con of all.

The Brothers also begins with a wedding, a vision of a glowing bride dressed in white, bearing flowers--and a gun. This recurring nightmare has Jackson Smith (Morris Chestnut), a handsome twenty-nine-year-old physician, waking in a cold sweat. "You think a commitment to a woman means death?" his shrink asks him. Yup, pretty much. Jackson is one of four basketball-playing, nightclub-hopping L.A. buddies approaching their thirties with mixed feelings about their fast lifestyle. When one of them, Terry, decides to marry--"From this moment on," he announces, "I'm a one-woman man"--the others react with varying attitudes of admiration, nervousness, and scorn. The pledge launches a series of bull sessions in which the four (and, in parallel, their girlfriends) strategize over matters of the heart, or, in the men's parlance, "Love, happiness, and all that shit."

Central to the comedy are black male pride and the geopolitics of dating. "We're single black professional men," says Brian, a lawyer and the group's most incorrigible womanizer, "we're the cream of the crop." Debuting writer-director Gary Hardwick deploys this inflated sense of self as ammunition in the battle of the sexes. "I'm a doctor," Jackson announces to Denise (Gabrielle Union), a thoughtful (and gorgeous) woman he meets at a party. "Why do you say it like that?" she asks him. "Like, 'I'm Zeus, I'm king of the gods.'" She's on to him, and a romance begins.

Hardwick's script awkwardly jumbles heartfelt moments together with raucous low humor. When Jackson's psychologist advises him to open up his spiritual self in his relationships, to try becoming friends with a woman before becoming lovers, he says, "Sorry doc, but my spiritual self needs the booty." Jokes about "hos" and cheap laughs over oral sex yield to startlingly lovely scenes between mothers and their grown sons: like Brian's mother, a woman so bitter about the fathers of her two children, both of whom deserted her, that she can't even hug her son; and Jackson's mother, Louise (Jenifer Lewis), who challenges him, "Is that the kind of existence you want--life without love in it?" For the girlfriends' benefit, Louise offers a cute new twist on the old truth about the way to a man's heart. To find out whether he really loves you, she advises, just wait until you're sitting together late at night on the couch, getting cuddly in front of TV and a late-night snack. "If he will give you his very last piece of food," she says, "then you've got love!" (At this, three women in the row ahead of me burst out laughing: "Is she a sister, or is she a sister!")

The Brothers is aimed at a black audience--I was the only non-African American in the theater--but in fact it has plenty in common with Heartbreakers. Both films, despite scads of sexy talk, scantily clad bodies, and anatomical joking, shun actual nudity, preserving an aura of safety, if not sanctity, around the love act itself. Both peddle glitzy images of wealth: Heartbreakers' Palm Beach scenes resemble the life insurance commercial in which a dead man's ex-wives compare the respective yachts he's left them, while The Brothers depicts a world of swimming pools, tony restaurants, and graduation-gift BMWs, bringing both the assets and anxieties of upper-middle-class life (fear of crime-ridden neighborhoods; the sorrows of divorce) home to African Americans.

Finally, like Heartbreakers, The Brothers reveals the pervasiveness of therapy, how its values and language ripple through the mainstream of American culture, black as well as white. The girlfriends talk a mixture of therapeutic and feminist boilerplate: "I don't know why women always end up paying for men's emotional failures," Jackson's sister announces. "This is a new millennium, and women are saying goodbye to dependency." Even the guys quote Deepak Chopra, and rib each other with a casual "Man, you got issues, you know that?" And an angst-ridden scene between Jackson and his father includes the following: "I hate it when you do that--rationalize your faults like that. Can't you just be ashamed of your shit for once?"

This brazen mix of idioms could be satire, but it isn't. Like Heartbreakers, The Brothers leaves characters and audience alike in a distinctly American predicament, somewhere on the near side of comedy. It's hard to know when to laugh and when to cry with so much healing going on.

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