KISSING COUSINS

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(3 of 3)

It ought to work as well now as it did in the '50s; Cinderella stories don't date any more than Jane Austen stories do. And the new acting team isn't half bad. Ford's muttering misanthropy may actually be funnier than Bogart's harder, more sardonic take on Linus. Ormond is no Audrey Hepburn, but Hepburn was sui generis, and Ormond does have a shy charm all her own. And there is a wastrely weakness about Kinnear's good looks that suits David more neatly than Holden's square-cut handsomeness did.

But in updating the script, Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel have too often substituted topical one-liners (some of them quite funny) for well-joined badinage. This has a distancing effect. Even worse, someone made a disastrous decision to lengthen the early sequence in which Sabrina finds herself in Paris. Wilder got through her maturation at montage speed; Pollack lingers over it for 20 inconsequential minutes, a bring-down from which the movie never quite recovers.

And so it goes. Pollack and his team have cast good actors (John Wood, Nancy Marchand) in the supporting roles but have, at best, provided turns for them to do rather than parts for them to play. They have hired expensive locations, which are supposed to impart authenticity to the film but which begin to look like overconsidered stage sets. We remain outside the fourth wall looking in but are never drawn in; bemused perhaps, even agreeably complaisant, but never entirely amused.

In other words, they have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated--but nothing on the grand scale of Thompson's great blowout.