Neil LaBute wades into the mainstream, above the ankles, over the knees. He, as we learned from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, is a filmmaker uncommonly tough of mind and of hide. That toughness, along with that almost reptilian coldness, is patently of less use in a less "realistic," a sillier, a screwballier comedy, where laughs are a more accurate measure of success. (Less use, that is, unless in coping with the consequent criticism.) The idea, in its barest bones, sounds as if it ought to have had some laughs in it: a small-town soap fan gets it into her head that she is the one woman in the world for the furrowed-browed neurosurgeon on A Reason to Love. But each piece of flesh, each article of clothing, added onto those bones will diminish the potential. A movie about an overzealous soap fan automatically has less to say about soap fans in general, and about their blurred borderline between reality and fantasy, when the fan in question suffers a psychotic break. And the event that precipitates the break -- the literal scalping of her philandering husband -- is of sufficient ugliness to put a damper on laughs for the duration. Maybe this is LaBute's signal to us, as the waters of the mainstream climb up his calves, that he has not lost his toughness. And maybe the husband (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart, with a white-trash "shlong" haircut: short on top, long in the back) is himself of sufficient ugliness that we are expected to be able to enjoy his mutilation. But then again, maybe this is simply a sign of the filmmaker's insensitivity (distant synonym of "toughness"), comparable to his seeming blindness to the nonstop ugly photography. If for LaBute the movie is something of a "stretch," it is not also much of a strain. It is mulishly slow, plodding, paceless, lethargic. Just the kinds of qualities, here again, that matter less when laughs matter less. Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear, Tia Texada, Allison Janney, Kathleen Wilhoite. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd