Hope Floats

On a Ricki Lake-like talk show, Birdee Pruitt (Sandra Bullock) listens as best friend Connie (Rosanna Arquette) confesses that she's having an affair with Birdee's husband. After this national humiliation, Birdee and her daughter, Bernice (Mae Whitman), ditch Chicago and head for Birdee's hometown of Smithville, Texas, and into the arms of an eccentric "Momma" (Gena Rowlands) and a small-town boy, Justin Matisse (Harry Connick Jr.), who's had a thing for Birdee since high school. Birdee's a legend in Smithville, where she won the Queen of Corn beauty pageant three years in a row as a teen, then left town in the arms of the high-school quarterback (her currently cheating husband). Now that she's back home, everyone wants to know whether she's been drinking.

Bullock plays essentially the same attractive woman she does in all her movies. The formulaic romance between her and Connick wouldn't be bad -- they look good together and seem pretty giggly -- but the plot has so many gaps that you have no idea when or why Justin fell in love with Birdee, what his character is really like, and whether Birdee is as great as everyone thinks she is. Hope Floats is a misnomer for a leaky tub of a movie with a storyline that sinks. At the Copley Place, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

-- Rachel O'Malley