The award for most outstanding premise in an artistic flop goes to Rob Reiner's Rumor Has It. Imagine a young woman discovering that her mother and grandmother had an affair with the same man, then learning that her mother actually fled to Mexico with this man before her marriage to the young woman's father. To make matters more complicated, the young woman finds that the whole sordid business has been immortalized in two classic pieces of American pop culture: Charles Webb's 1963 novel, The Graduate, and Mike Nichols' 1967 film version of the book. The woman she has been calling "grandma" all these years is actually the randy Mrs. Robinson.

Thrown into these discoveries is the realization that the young woman was born rather prematurely after her parents' nuptials. Could the passionate hiatus in Mexico with "Benjamin Braddock" have been the moment of her conception? "It's a little secret, just the Robinsons' affair / Most of all you've got to hide it from the kids," as Messrs. Simon and Garfunkel would have it.

What could have followed this imaginative setup was a wry comedy about the fluctuating mores and manners of upper-middle class Pasadena from the 1960s to the '90s. Instead, Reiner has played Meathead, and concocted an embarrassingly unfunny sitcom that limps and plods along toward its sloppy, saccharine conclusion. Never underestimate Hollywood's gift for spinning gold into straw.

With the family secrets primarily sorted, the young woman, Sarah (Jennifer Aniston), takes off to find "Benjamin Braddock," who is actually a star of the Bay Area dot-com bubble named Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner). Though he swears that he can't possibly be Sarah's progenitor, she still nurses suspicions in the back of her mind — not that these stop her from actually bedding the man.

This incestuous turn of events is also interesting, except that Reiner imagines himself directing something that might be titled When Sally Met Oedipus. The film suddenly graduates into romantic comedy, which is a bit difficult to swallow, like a comedic-though-heartwarming romp with Lot and his daughters in the cave.

Aniston is, of course, an old hand at putting across banal sitcom dialogue. However, you feel dreadful for her throughout the film, since she comes across as an actress who's longing for a serious project, something she hasn't had since The Good Girl in 2002. Here she's simply invited to affect various faces and postures, and to utter imbecilities. Costner is another actor desperately hunting for decent work, and is trapped like everyone else in this latest failure to add to CVs. As in so many of his recent films, Costner is cardboard.

Not that it's Costner's fault, but one wonders where this film might have gone if, instead of casting a defunct matinee idol as "Benjamin," Reiner had actually hired Dustin Hoffman to play the role, especially since the actor's later pronounced nebbishness is such an interesting counterpoint to his younger cocksuredness. Imagine Sarah finding out that the family stud actually looks like the Rain Man.

As for Mrs. Robinson, there was only one Anne Bancroft. Crowbarred into her heels, however, we have her Turning Point nemesis, Shirley MacLaine. It's impolite to say it, but it's time Shirley packed up her greasepaint. She has entered the cartoon phase of her career (a tragedy that befalls most talented American actors), and it's unendurable watching her. Like some bus-and-truck version of Ruth Gordon, she swaggers about the set searching for any stray scraps of scenery to gnaw. Her delivery is far too forced — but then, in her defense, how could anyone put across such deathless witticisms as, "Jeff, go play with your dick." No, it's best to remember Shirl as she was before she began resembling César Romero's Joker.