So Richard Gere plays this uptight workaholic asshole who learns to live after falling in love with blithe spirit Winona Ryder. No, wait a minute, that was last year’s Autumn in New York. This is this year’s Sweet November, itself a remake of the 1968 film that was a kind of horrible precursor to Love Story in 1970. Okay, so Keanu Reeves plays this uptight workaholic asshole, let’s call him Nelson, who learns to live after falling in love with a blithe spirit, let’s call her Sarah, played by Charlize Theron. How does this happen? Well, Nelson’s the kind of advertising guy with a cell phone attached to his ear who forgets that his girlfriend’s parents are coming to town and designs ad campaigns making hot dogs look like diabolical phallic symbols. You know the type I’m talking about. Anyway, he has to renew his driver’s license. (Symbol? I don’t think so.) When Sarah comes in, he notices her when she drops a salami. (Symbol? Yes! It’s vegan salami.) He asks her to cheat for him on the test and she gets tossed out. In revenge, perhaps, she stalks him, gets him to abet her in a crime (she rescues cute puppies from a medical-experimentation lab!), and when he loses his job and girlfriend she gets him to move in with her for a month to be her Mr. November so she can transform him into a nice guy (it’s a thing she does).

So before he knows it, Nelson is walking five white poodles simultaneously! He’s playing blindman’s buff in the bedroom! He’s having dinner with the downstairs neighbors and they’re transvestites! (Okay, this is San Francisco.) How can he resist? I admit; I couldn’t either. No, it wasn’t director Pat O’Connor’s potentially record-setting (look this up) six bliss montages backed, let’s be fair, with quality music. Nor was it Keanu Reeves, who’s basically a lug nut who has to pretend he’s not interested in a beautiful hippie throwback to the Love Generation offering herself up, no strings attached. Maybe it’s Theron, with her moony face and earnest smile, her big shoes and kicky clothes and relentless serotonin level that makes you want to end every sentence with an exclamation point! Or maybe it’s the whole theme of love’s exultation and transience, which has been making suckers of audiences since Romeo and Juliet and Orpheus and beyond. I think, though, it’s just the dreary month of February, whose traditionally sour studio fare makes a manipulative confection like Sweet November seem ruefully sweet indeed.