One Fine Day

“One Fine Day” puts two highly popular actors onto a romantic collision course, with results that, however predictable, are fun to watch.

Michelle Pfeiffer is Melanie, a divorcee with a son who loves toy cars, soccer, and shoving objects up his nose. George Clooney is Jack, also divorced, with a daughter who loves cats and tends to wonder off if not watched closely. One fine (rainy) Manhattan morning sees both children miss the bus to the school field trip and so become the concern of their harried single parents.

Melanie, an architect, has a crucial presentation to make that day; Jack, a newspaper columnist, must document the charges he made in a recent story or lose his job. The two, then, are forced into a frantic day of passing the children back and forth as they try to deal with their individual career crises. In the process they learn a bit about both parenthood and career.

Anyone who knows movies knows how a romantic comedy will end, but these are two very watchable stars, and the scriptwriters have given them some more-than-passable dialogue. Observing them, then, as they move from initial hostility to grudging acceptance and eventually to something more, will provide an engaging two hours for most viewers. The children are cute enough to make up for their occasionally trying behavior.

There is a sprinkling of expletives, but relatively few for a film of this type, and none of them are really strong ones. Sexual references are few. There is no nudity, though Pfeiffer does change her blouse a couple of times; but in a comic, not erotic, context. The language is the chief reason this rating was not higher.

Though this is fundamentally a comedy, it does manage to make some points about the relative importance of jobs and family, and Pfeiffer has one scene on this topic that you will want to applaud.