确定地可能 Definitely, Maybe review by Harvey Karten

During the 1940s, when ten-year-old kids asked their folks where they came from, they’d often hear, “From the stork, darling.” In the 1950s, the answer might have been “From Macy’s, sweetheart.” During the ’60s, a mom might reply, “Oh, from my tummy, dear,” but by then the kids would have heard all about it from their pals in the street. Nowadays, according to an early scene in Definitely, Maybe, the Source of Life is part of the elementary school curriculum, where at least one class finds out that a baby’s birth begins from “the thrust of the penis.”

Is anything left that a kid wants to ask his parents about? Sure there is! Maya Hayes (Abigail Breslin), who is all of ten years old, wants her advertising-exec dad, Will (Ryan Reynolds), to go back at least nine months from her conception to learn how he met her mom. Now that Will and his wife are about to divorce, Maya demands a bedtime story from dad, one that cannot be taught in school.

As Will unfolds the tale, writer-director Adam Brooks—who scripted Wimbledon and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason—has him telling his daughter of the three main squeezes he dated before his engagement to Maya’s mom, making a game of the yarn by giving them fictitious names. And then, miracle to behold, director Brooks gives us in the audience a romantic comedy that is head and shoulders above the routine pap that the major studios throw at us annually.

The secret? Maybe it has to do with the strong characters, not a stereotype in the lot, each of whom serves as a credible contender for the position of Maya’s mother. Or perhaps it’s the game that we, sitting in our seats, can play along with Maya: Odds are about 4-1 that we can guess the identities of both Will’s wife and the person he is most likely to wind up with. (I got the first right, missed the second.) And let’s not dismiss the dialogue: engaging, witty, intelligent—a far cry from the banal chatter that envelops so-called action romances like Andy Tennant’s Fool’s Gold and more in line with the clever talk featured in indies like Nadine Labaki’s Caramel. Nor does Brooks need to rely on vulgarities (however funny) such as what’s found in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or the forced, hip humor (however urbane) of Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda.

Will’s narrative begins with his college sweetheart, girl-next-door Emily (Elizabeth Banks), who is disappointed that her boyfriend is leaving their native Madison, Wisconsin to work on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign in New York. At campaign headquarters, he meets April (Isla Fisher), who has no political opinions but works the photocopy machine because the job pays 12 bucks an hour. He also connects also with one of Emily’s friends from college, Summer (Rachel Weisz), the most sophisticated woman of the three, an ambitious journalist whose sixty-something boyfriend is a brilliant, extroverted professor, Hampton (Kevin Kline).

The more Will reveals, the more his daughter is intrigued with the idea of romance, though Maya wonders why love is so “complicated.” Every so often, she stops the story to get a better grip on love’s subtleties, leading director Brooks to offer us in the audience a freeze-frame or, in one case, a backup and restart—none of which allows Maya to commit herself to guessing which of the three becomes Will’s wife.

The film is told with a political backdrop. Journalist Summer shows Will an article she has written exposing a candidate for governor for whom Will is campaigning, leading to obvious friction between him and the writer. In one scene, Bill Clinton, surrounded by a dozen bodyguards, jogs through Central Park, apparently waving to Will who calls out to him, reminding the ex-prez of his own work on the man’s campaign. Some humorous archival films on the TV screen show Mr. Clinton’s now-famous quotes, “I did not have with that woman,” and “It depends on what the meaning of is, is.”

Breslin is always reliable, perhaps the best of her generation’s child actors. Reynolds is blandly handsome, not necessarily the sort that women of such diverse personalities as Summer, April and Emily would go for. But he has a terrific sense of comic timing, appealing to an audience that adores Woody Allen-style restraint rather than Seth Rogen’s signature vulgarity.

Because the action takes place during the early 1990s, before some in the expected audience were born, the major appeal of this romantic comedy will be among those in their thirties and forties and beyond. The picture, then, is a maybe for teens and twenty-somethings, definitely for mature adults, and of particular interest to a female audience that enjoys strong parts for women: an all-around winner.

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