NEW YORK — Just because they're no longer romantically involved doesn't mean they can't make a romantic movie together. So here come Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow, having cycled their way through the tabloids, starring in "Bounce," opening Friday. In the twist-of-fate film written and directed by Don Roos, she plays a widow and mother who doesn't know that the man romancing her is the same guy who gave her husband his seat on a plane that crashed a year ago. Affleck is the would-be lover sitting on a guilty secret, wondering how to handle it without spoiling the fragile relationship developing between them.
Paltrow plays a grown-up Valley Girl, disclosing not the slightest trace of her Manhattan Upper East Side silk-stocking district upbringing. Affleck begins by playing the same sort of breezy extrovert he has played in his big broad-brush studio films like "Armageddon," a cocky adman who falls off his perch, shaken by the experience and at something of a loss when it comes to handling the feelings he experiences when guilt sends him to look in on the widow of the man he inadvertently sent to death in his place a year before.
Meanwhile, Paltrow and Affleck are playing out an inadvertent little Noel Coward drama. They are sitting maybe 50 feet apart in separate but adjacent suites in a Park Avenue hotel, a mile or so from where Paltrow grew up. They're doing interviews to publicize "Bounce," talking to reporters who mostly want to ask them about their offscreen association that resonates strongly through it. Affleck, of course, grew up in Cambridge. He and his boyhood pal Matt Damon saw their careers take off simultaneously. Ever since "Good Will Hunting," which won them both Oscars, they have become part of America's Hollywood career jackpot folklore. Since his overnight move from no profile to high profile, Affleck, 28, has warily been dancing the Hollywood tango, alternating blockbusters with smaller films that allow him to stretch more.
For every "Armageddon," which hit big, or "Reindeer Games," which didn't, there have been smaller roles in smaller-scale films such as "Dogma," "Boiler Room," and "Shakespeare in Love." While Paltrow won her Oscar for playing the luminous romantic lead in that film, Affleck had fun playing the likable ham actor Shakespeare needed to make his obscure new play, "Romeo and Juliet," more commercial. It is in this smaller, more venturesome group of films that "Bounce" belongs. Affleck is upfront about the romance that has evolved into a friendship with Paltrow. He says she frequently has urged him to stretch in his choice of material and that his involvement with "Bounce" began when she sent him the script for it.
"Gwyneth called me up and said, 'You know, I've got this script I want to do and I think you'd be great to do it. You should do something, you know, very kind of small in terms of just being about people being in their relationships.' I read it, thought it was well drawn, and that it was really an actor's movie. It offered the chance to do some new kind of textured stuff, multilayered stuff. I really looked at it as an actor's challenge first and foremost. Working with Gwyneth, I mean, there's an element that's awkward, obviously, when you've been in a relationship, you know, and then we weren't. I'd be lying if I said it was easy, but the benefit was that if you work with somebody that good, you're in good shape and it just makes you better. She's too much of a professional to ever let any of her, like, whatever, personal issues, get in the way.'
"When I see the movie, I don't really see me and Gwyneth in there. I see the characters that Don created. But maybe on a very subconscious level you are able to tap into a memory of intimacy, or a feeling of being scared, or a feeling of warmth. But in terms of specifics, our life is so different from the lives of these characters that there were never any obvious parallels. It really helped on an emotional level. You know, feeling emotionally susceptible and referencing, like, a history saved me the trouble of doing more homework."
Shuttling between big commercial projects and smaller, riskier films is essential, as Affleck sees it. He just finished shooting one of next summer's likely blockbusters, "Pearl Harbor," and will succeed Harrison Ford as CIA analyst Jack Ryan in the next Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of All Fears." But he also recently wrapped a Billy Bob Thornton comedy alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, "Daddy and Them." He's eyeing "Zoolander" with Owen Wilson. And doing "Bounce" led him to another commercially chancy project, "Changing Lanes," opposite Samuel L. Jackson. "I play a guy who's a lawyer, who gets in a traffic accident with a guy who's on his way to court to try and get his kids back. We make one another late and we start this chain of events where both of our lives start to separately fall apart.
"It's about trying to maintain your humanity in a world where society pounds it out of you and about the challenge of trying to figure out who you are without all these crutches for your identity, like your job title and your marriage. It's a complex role and and morally, you know, uncertain, and I don't think I would have taken on something as ambitious and unusual as that without having done (Bounce). You know," Affleck says, describing his game plan, "you have to do things where your work can be good, so the directors you want to work with will want to work with you."