Serendipity, like Cusack's whole career, illustrates the New Auteur Theory in action: Forget the old heroes, the people with the camera--they can't save us. Who could have more heart and soul than Chelsom (Funny Bones) and de Borman (Saving Grace, The Full Monty)? All Chelsom can do here is smuggle in the odd slice of life: a random Hasidic golfer glimpsed at a driving range, a bracing swoosh of the camera here and there. If you want to work, you've got to cast your style before swine.

No, our sole hope is the enlightened despotism of actors. Look what Cusack's ornery independence has achieved. He broke out of the Brat Pack by renouncing and artistically trouncing the soulless corporate youth movie, etched his Grifters role in righteous acid, co-wrote the against-the-grain High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank, and made the screen world safe for Spike Jonze and Nick Hornby. When he does a big, dumb film, it's to collect clout for art, and he subverts Mammon at every opportunity. If he must do an action hero in Con Air, he does it in Birkenstocks. He forced a wholesale rewrite of America's Sweethearts when he took the lead from Billy Crystal, trying to put some English on the gags, some backspin. Cusack may even reverse Woody Allen's creative death spiral in the film they're cooking up. The key is that Cusack is savvy, pragmatic, yet skew to the plane of all that makes movies so bad.

Most signs of life in Serendipity were planted furtively by actors desperate to escape the story's shackles. Eugene Levy does much with little as a martinet sales clerk who briefly torments Cusack. (But see how much more he can do in Best in Show or the lost worlds of SCTV or Splash, where he was unconfined by formulas.) Most of the film's best moments are the largely improvised scenes of Cusack and Piven cracking wise. Those spontaneous looks of shock you see on the wedding party's faces in Piven's toast scene are reactions to startlingly off-the-script things he made up on the spot. It would be grimly charmless to hear Jon and Sara quiz each other about their favorite sex positions on their first skating-rink date without Beckinsale's expert pratfall on the ice and the nice-guy naturalness of Cusack's quip, "Yeah, that's my favorite position too." His performance has qualities the studio system can't grasp: It's humane, understated, seemingly uncorrupt.

When I'm on movie sets with big male stars, I'm always struck by how small they are--I feel like I could carry Nicolas Cage or Sly Stallone off under my arm, like Dino grabbing Sammy Davis and saying, "I'd like to thank the NAACP for this award!" Yet how they strut and puff themselves up! One $20 million star actually has a colleague slap his face to ready him for the camera, shouting, "You're [name of $20 million star]!" causing the star to bellow, "I'm [name of $20 million star]!" until he really feels big. It's Pathetic Method acting.

John Cusack, by contrast, really is big, over six feet tall. He flying-tackled me in the snow once on a film set, just for fun and out of boredom (and maybe to express his opinion of the press). It hurt: The guy is all muscle. But instead of acting big, he does the opposite. He crouches, makes himself look smaller, a rather cryptic human question mark in place of the human exclamation point that most stars aspire to become. (The scene in Being John Malkovich where he's on the 7 1/2 floor of a building with extremely low ceilings uses this Cusack tendency to excellent comic effect.) He always ducks the obvious, loud, self-aggrandizing statement in favor of the quiet, inquisitive, other-focused, elusively self-concealing statement. Not that he's any less of an egomaniac than most other stars--just more interesting.

Every love story on film is contrived, and we're all inclined to give the most rickety fairy tale the benefit of the doubt. All it takes is the illusion of spontaneity. Serendipity should have heeded the stern Correct Usage warning under "serendipity" in my Encarta dictionary: "The idea of discovery is necessary to the word." As John Barth put it, "You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings." But nothing is left to chance in Serendipity. The film should have been as open to discovery as its star is. As it is, the whole excessively premeditated thing has less emotional resonance than that single quick scene in Being John Malkovich where Cusack's puppeteer character manipulates a pair of marionettes miming a tortured embrace. You know they're made of wood, you can clearly see the strings--everything you see on a screen is a manipulation--yet you can feel an unmistakable human pain and passion.

John Cusack probably won't get elected President of the United States. But maybe he should be President of Hollywood.

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