Forces Of Nature

Now families and mortgages have given way to second or third marriages coupled enthusiastically with cynicism. The progressive destruction of the nuclear family has been well and truly reflected in popular entertainment.

So could you expect Sandra Bullock (Speed, Time To Kill, The Net) and Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare In Love) to be romantic clean skins in Forces Of Nature?

Well actually Ben (Affleck) is giving it a go. He's on his way from New York to be married in Savannah to Bridget (Maura Tierney). On the way he encounters a series of natural and unnatural forces which throw him together with the effervescent and much more worldly Sarah (Sandra Bullock).

Will Ben throw over Bridget for Sarah and how funny will the process be? These after all are the questions we attend these films to answer.

Well Forces Of Nature is very funny once or twice but it's real value is its knowing observations on the institution of marriage. Ben is repeatedly confronted by the failure of the unions he observes while he's on the road to his own marriage.

The message isn't savage but it is persuasive. He meets an deliriously happy elderly couple who he then finds out are having an affair after years of misery with their previous partners. His parents squabble and Sarah is hardly an advertisement for happy unions.

But Forces Of Nature isn't maudlin, it's often very humourous and it's lifted by the relationship between Ben and Sarah which I found charming and believable even as the Forces Of Nature affecting their relationship become increasingly bizarre. (There's even a hurricane!)

It's been a long wait for a fetching film from Sandra Bullock. Speed was a huge success but her career has been largely a mess since then. But her Sarah is amusing and multifaceted, as is the more dour Ben from Ben Affleck.

Forces Of Nature mixed the improbable with the likeable in an intelligent way and is well worth a visit. And for once it would seem that we have one up on American viewers of an American film.

Apparently a great deal of license has been taken with one or two geographical locations in the film, a bit akin for Australians to setting a film in Melbourne and then transplanting the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Port Phillip Bay.

This upset some Americans but we Aussies couldn't give a damn, could we.