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Topher Grace is extremely likable in his first big film role as Carter Duryea, a whiz-kid salesman who finds himself in over his head when he lands a new job at Sports America, a fictional but wholesome-sounding magazine. Like director Paul Weitz’s last film, the superior About a Boy, this one is about a boy trying to become a man. Carter is "being groomed" for the big time, but his personal life is a mess, and he starts to wonder what it all means and what kind of man he wants to be. He has for a model Dennis Quaid’s Dan Foreman, whose very name sounds solid, the kind of guy you can count on. But the relationship gets muddled when Carter becomes Dan’s boss after a media conglomerate buys Sports America. Weitz squeezes in an anti-corporate speech for Dan, but the better story involves the father-son tension between Dan and Carter. Carter’s romance with Dan’s college-age daughter (played with delicate sensitivity by Scarlett Johansson) doesn’t simplify matters. Although he won his spurs with American Pie, Weitz’s style here is more like a soufflé: light, classy, short on substance. (109 minutes)
BY BROOKE HOLGERSON
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