Starring Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Ruffalo, and Mena Suvari. Rated PG.

For a movie born of couples emotionally scorched by their, and others', unconscionable passions, Rumour Has It”¦ suffers from an appalling lack of warmth.

In the film, Jennifer Aniston reasserts her wonderfully expressive naso-labial folds and tight-lipped consternation to play Sarah Huttinger, a weepy, unhappily engaged journalist who learns her family was the basis of the 1967 film The Graduate, which starred Dustin Hoffman as a lad seduced by his girlfriend's mother. Lord know it could have been worse, like Steel Magnolias or even Battlefield Earth, but Sarah's horrified to the point of boinking Beau (Kevin Costner), who inspired the Hoffman character and previously coo-coo-catchooed his way into her mom and grandma. This is despite the fact that moments earlier, she suspected him of being her biological father. Now, the day that the possibility of incest has us rolling in the aisles is the day director Rob Reiner pockets a Republican membership card.

An incorrigible Shirley MacLaine helps us there, in the few measly scenes she's granted. Costner and Aniston look peachy in the Pasadena sun, but unlike their normally wisecracking selves, they seem curiously detached, as if they found out 10 minutes beforehand that they were to star in the film. As Sarah's newly married little sister, Mena Suvari's Annie is a bubbly delight thrilled about wedlock. For this misstep, she must of course be ridiculed. The movie's biggest failing, however, is neither this cynicism about love nor that it's built around a 40-year-old hit movie instead of starting from scratch. It's that Rumour Has It”¦ fails to shore up its arguments. If, as it illustrates, women are better off when broken and resigned to marriages of convenience than swept up in passionate adventures with affable millionaires who fly their own planes and live at the beach, why is Sarah's face only suffused with joy when she's with Beau? Costner's three-generation humper is meant to be to seen as if he came, and I do mean came, with a siren and a red warning light flashing above his head. To the contrary, we see him as a genuine sweetheart, heroically unafraid to utter that four-word proposal every stressed-out modern gal longs to hear: "Let's cheer you up."

It's not until Mark Ruffalo's dignified cuckold lectures Sarah that it dawns on us that the movie's a giant con. That is, while Beau's been cheering Sarah up, and we've been cheering her on, she actually is a darn unlikable cheating slut with only bitchin' hair to recommend her. Reiner is known to be a passionate antismoking advocate, but it appears he has nothing against putting moral bankruptcy on-screen that might corrupt our young womenfolk.