'Something's' wrong, but it's not Jack and Diane The big news in ''Something's Gotta Give'' is that a 63-year-old man can make love once to a woman comfortably in her 50s, then turn around and want to do it again. This is front-page stuff for people tired of seeing actors such as Sean Connery, Richard Gere, and Michael Douglas shack up on screen with every starlet in town. And it's even more exciting because the folks making the love are Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, both of whom appear to be in prime comedic and sexual form. But doesn't America's 50-and-fabulous set deserve better than a movie this superficial and pandering? Written and directed by the romantic comedy veteran Nancy Meyers, it seems engineered to remind women that there's hope: You can be successful, senior, and single and still produce a pheromone that attracts men both your age and half of it. The premise isn't a fantasy -- attention AARP-ers: There's a lot of sex in you yet -- but the movie is. In a plot that comes straight from the Nora Ephron shelf at the video store, Keaton plays Erica Barry, a playwright with an unreasonable hankering for turtlenecks. She's been divorced and subsequently single for years. One afternoon, she walks into her Hamptons beach house armed with her quipster sister Zoe (Frances McDormand) and discovers that hip-hop executive Harry Sanborn (Nicholson) is dating her daughter Marin (Amanda Peet). Harry suffers a heart attack while going at it with Marin, and his doctor (Keanu Reeves) recommends that he convalesce at Erica's rather than return to Manhattan. The setup is nonsense, but Meyers is stuck for a way to have Erica fall for her houseguest and every man fall for her. The trouble is that the director doesn't seem to have left her apartment since the ''Ally McBeal'' prototype ''Molly Dodd'' was canceled. Meyers imagines herself at the vanguard of some women's movement, but based on her film resume, it's tempting to call her contributions a setback. She's co-written and produced crowd pleasers such as ''Private Benjamin,'' ''Baby Boom,'' and the super-hit ''What Women Want,'' which she also directed. But her vision of the war between the sexes has always been less World War II and more Grenada. In ''Something's Gotta Give,'' she dresses up Erica's predicament (being single stinks) in such vanity and fake sophistication that you might hate the character were Keaton not playing her. Erica's new play is set in Paris, and to get in the mood she puts on a lot of French music. This is merely preparation for when Harry jets over there to win her back. (The film is an act too long.) And why make Harry a hip-hop mogul when it's embarrassingly clear that Meyers has no idea what that means? McDormand's character happens to be a professor of women's studies; Reeves's doctor asks Erica on dates and lavishes her with compliments, but he never seems anything but an invention of the folks at Harlequin books. And it's a major personal and symbolic achievement to have spry old Harry scissoring open Erica's turtleneck in the heat of the moment. She's free, but from what? Later, when things start to go south between the lovers, Erica pecks herself a play about the affair. Would a person as sensitive as Erica write such dumb and transparent theater? If Erica really is the biggest thing since Lillian Hellman, as someone in the film suggests, then the critics and audiences who've made her so need to get out more. Ultimately, ''Something's Gotta Give'' is useful only as a little ditty about Jack and Diane: what a professional bachelor he is, and what a polished neurotic she's become. The walks and picnics Harry and Erica enjoy on the beach take us back 22 years to when Nicholson and Keaton were lovey-dovey in ''Reds,'' and he was the playwright and she was the playboy. He was gentle, she was on edge. In ''Something's Gotta Give,'' Nicholson, gone broader and louder, tells his costar she's ''formidable'' and ''imperious'' but ''better when her defenses are down.'' That's a lovely and true bit of film criticism. And he's right to be smitten with Keaton. She's sublime. So much so that she makes everyone else, besides Nicholson, seem merely adequate. Fortunately, Nicholson's sinister eyebrows and Keaton's runaway body language can't be dictated on the pages of a screenplay. The affair turns them into 25-year-olds. Yet, just in the way they taste the air after a kiss, or look at each other, or don't look at each other, failing to see eye to eye in matters of sex and love, the movie stars reach something deeply, complexly human. They're these amazing pop-ups in a smug kiddie book.

By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff
Boston Globe Published: 12/12/2003