Mighty Aphrodite

Three years after sports writer Lenny (Allen) allowed his art dealer wife Amanda (Bonham Carter) to persuade him that they should adopt a child, a nagging curiosity about where young Max's brains came from leads Lenny to seek out the boy's natural mother, hooker Linda Ash (Sorvino), marginally better known as actress 'Judy Cum'. Horrified by, but sympathetic to Linda's plight, Lenny tries to better her life, pursuing his mission with such zeal that he barely notices when Amanda, encouraged by smooth Jerry Bender (Weller), starts to drift away from him. Lenny's another of Allen's nervy, intellectual, middle-class heroes, and most of the gags centre on the clash of social and cultural aspirations arising from his encounter with the dumb-blonde tart-with-a-heart. A make-weight Greek chorus is thrown in to comment on Lenny's hubristic do-gooding. Sorvino does her able best to transform her caricature into someone to care about; Bonham Carter copes respectably with a relatively minor role; and Rapaport contributes a fair turn as an unbelievably stupid boxer. But Allen's familiar device of juxtaposing sentiments and language, the lofty and the banal (one moment the Olympians, the next the nebbish protagonist), rapidly palls.