THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION (Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Starring Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda).

JENNIFER ANISTON hasn’t exactly astounded anybody with her choices in film scripts since she made the leap from Friends – this is her second lightweight romantic comedy on the trot – but she is by some distance the most commanding actor of the sitcom sextet, and she turns in a typically lively performance here which goes some way to rescue The Object Of My Affection from plumbing any of the depths of awfulness hinted at by the movie’s premise – girl meets guy, girl falls in love with guy, guy happens to be gay, all manner of complications ensue.

Paul Rudd plays the charming, handsome hero with a commendable subtlety, although the role is a dodgily-scripted one which plays up excessively to the All-Gays-Are-Saints cliché increasingly apparent in Hollywood movies concerning homosexuality.

Sure enough, Aniston’s heterosexual boyfriend (Tim Daly) is portrayed as a loathsome, arrogant, obnoxious swine: when Aniston gets sick of him, she begins to focus her affections on Rudd. A tricky conundrum arises when Aniston discovers that she’s pregnant by Daly, than asks Rudd to help raise her baby as a surrogate father: meanwhile, Rudd is falling in love with another man (Nigel Hawthorne, in his first openly gay role).

All of this is resolved rather predictably, and you’re never exactly on the edge of your seat, but there are a few finely-judged scenes and enough bitter-sweet one-liners to pass the duration pleasantly enough.

Too tame and insubstantial to be a tearjerker, The Object of My Affection is still a relatively decent rainy-afternoon video proposition, if nothing else.