WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN (Directed by Luis Mandoki. Starring Meg Ryan, Andy Garcia)

If you can get past the shameless misuse of Percy Sledge’s classic song, the drop dead gorgeousness and well-to-do lifestyles of the allegedly ordinary Joe leads, the inevitable Way We Were-Love Story shots of broken-hearted beach wanderings, and the general air of gooey-ness that underpins all American message movies, there is actually a good film in here somewhere fighting to get out.

Meg Ryan is Alice, a counsellor and mother-of-two, attempting to conceal a drift into alcoholism until a disastrous accident brings it all out. Known for light comedy, Ryan seizes the chance to play gut-wrenching emotion and make grandstanding speeches. She is matched in the latter by Andy Garcia as her husband, who’s virtuousness as the hard-done-by partner is cleverly tainted by a script that reveals him to be an inflexible man, whose half-comprehended desire to keep his wife vulnerable and dependent makes him her unspoken accomplice throughout her downward spiral and renders him largely unable to cope with the transformations brought on by her recovery.

These are intelligently written, complex parts, and the stars give it their all, but in a movie full of predictable turns of events it is not quite enough. After a few too many performances of monotone intensity, Garcia’s handsome sincerity is becoming a little tedious to this reviewer, and even Ryan’s vivacious charm is wearing thin . In a glowing eulogy at a party that may have the cynical reaching for their empty pop-corn bags, Garcia describes her as having a thousand different smiles, some of which can make you laugh, others make you cry, but in fact Meg has one endearingly goofy grin, the kind that might make an adolescent come in his pants but is not enough to sustain a serious performance for two hours.

The speeches are the film’s major flaw. Twelve-step programmes don’t really make for riveting viewing, and the round of AA meetings and anguished verbose confrontations begin to lend the film the air of a big screen Oprah. They should have a twelve-step programme for message movie-makers: step one – quit talking and cut to the chase. Garcia’s helpless rage at his Asian housekeeper says a whole lot more about his confusion than his attempts to encapsulate his feelings in nuggets of pop-psychology.

When A Man Loves A Woman avoids the sheer obviousness that so often goes with this territory, and manages at times to be both spiky and poignant, but without the dark wit of Michael Keaton’s Clean And Sober or the cinematic verve of Lost Weekend, it too often comes over as a self-help movie crossed with lifestyles of the middle-class and beautiful.