JUST IN TIME: A HOLIDAY STORY WITH HEART.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

It's a wonderful, sliding-door kind of life for me, myself and Mr. Scrooge in ``The Family Man,'' this year's prettily prepackaged, hopeful holiday perennial.

The movie, obviously, has everything a state-of-the-art Christmas fantasy should (even something of a Grinch, during star Nicolas Cage's tenser moments). You don't even need to shake the box to know that, inside, everybody will wind up with what they both need AND want (this is, after all, a boomer fable), that middle-class complacency will prove preferable to, well, anything else you could enjoy about life, and that African-Americans are always there to help confused white people figure things out (although it must be said that Don Cheadle gives that particular stereotype a teasing, subversive edge here).

But let it also be said that this predictable Christmas pudding actually possesses a little flavor, thanks almost entirely to its key performers.

Simple as the story is, it offers Cage one of his best platforms in years for the wide range of complicated emotions he's so good at displaying. There's confidence, charm, desperation, true sweetness, choleric hostility, disorientation and a whole lot more in the performance, often bundled into multiple responses to any given plot turn.

And while leading lady Tea Leoni doesn't have the demands placed on her that Cage does here, she achieves something she hasn't so far in her career: a believability that's also interesting. Having proved herself a first-class farceur on television and in such movies as ``Flirting With Disaster,'' she's yet to play a real person (the heroine of ``Deep Impact'' was not only upstaged by the comet, Leoni acted like she knew it through every moment of her performance).

Until, that is, now. Leoni's Kate Campbell deals with a very strange change in her husband's behavior exactly as a woman content with her marriage would: displacing the hurt and nurturing the forgiveness. And at the times when she can do neither, Leoni shows us a Kate whose faith in a shared life of bumpy but rewarding experience can't help but get her and Jack through. It's the most convincing display of married love that Hollywood has conjured up in ages.

What Kate doesn't know is that the odd new Jack is not the man she's been married to for 13 years at all. Their young daughter figures out the situation to her satisfaction pretty quickly - Daddy has been replaced by a nice but clueless alien. Actually, Jack is getting a supernatural glimpse of what his life may have been like had he chosen to stay with Kate, who was his college girlfriend, rather than fly away to England for a business internship.

When we first meet Jack, it's hard to deny that that pragmatic decision paid off handsomely. A superstar of investment banking, he lives so grandly that even the suit closet in his co-op has a commanding window view of Lower Manhattan. And he isn't some poor, unhappy rich guy, either; he spends the night before Christmas Eve with Amber Valletta, and looks forward with genuine cheer to celebrating the holiday by closing a multibillion-dollar mega-merger.

It's only after a fateful encounter with the enchanted Cheadle that Jack wakes up in a ramshackle New Jersey two-story with kids calling him Daddy and Kate calling him honey. He is, understandably, appalled, and spends the next dozen or so scenes trying to return to the previous existence that no longer knows about him. Undone at every turn, Jack returns to Jersey and learns to love it. And in the process ... Well, the one surefire genre cliche this movie doesn't beat you with is Jack's inevitable transformation into a better person.

He does so, of course, but he wasn't that bad of a guy to begin with. Just more successful.

Believe it or not, that minor distinction may have been the key to director Brett Ratner's relatively adroit handling of the sticky-sweet material. His previous film, ``Rush Hour,'' was pretty much the ultimate thoughtless-guy movie success story. ``Family Man'' isn't so much an example of a populist filmmaker sentimentally exploring his sensitive side as it is the expression of someone who's got a lot and, well, figures he deserves a little more.

Happy Christmas, one and all.

``THE FAMILY MAN''

(Rated PG-13: language, adult situations)

The stars: Nicolas Cage, Tea Leoni, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Piven, Saul Rubinek, Josef Sommer.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Brett Ratner. Written by David Diamond and David Weissman. Produced by Marc Abraham, Zvi Howard Rosenman, Tony Ludwig and Alan Riche. Released by Universal Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, four minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars