The Family Man (2000)

Directed by Brett Ratner. Starring Nicolas Cage, Téa Leoni, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Piven, Josef Sommer, Saul Rubinek, Lisa Thornhill, Mary Beth Hurt, Makenzie Vega, Harve Presnell, Ruth Williamson, Amber Valletta. [PG-13]

Bachelor Wall Street exec Cage makes the acquaintance of enigmatic Cheadle on Christmas Eve, who soon after magically turns Cage’s life upside down by giving him a brief glimpse into an alternate life where he hadn’t left his college sweetheart (Leoni) behind, and instead married her, had a couple of kids, and ended up in middle-class “suburban hell.” Replete with homages to It’s a Wonderful Life, this obvious and sentimental fantasy shouldn’t work, but it does…to a point. It runs across the usual patches of highs and lows, some of them redundant in their reminders that Cage never stopped loving the one who got away, and the script by David Diamond and David Weissman ultimately paints itself into a corner by making it impossible to land at a satisfying ending. Cage gets to both play it straight and embrace the wild side, and Leoni is warmly winsome, but it all plays out with too little faith and confidence, as if the director was assigned in order to fulfill a community service sentence. Music by Danny Elfman, pretty generic and overearnest by his standards.

59/100