Verdict: Nicholson and Keaton are irresistible together, and Reeves just adds to the glow.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sixty-three-year-old Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) is a connoisseur of younger women. No wonder. He's been dating them for 40 years. Harry and the men like him and the women "of a certain age" who stay home at night because of Harry and the men like him, are the subject of Nancy Meyers' witty and thoughtful romantic comedy, "Something's Gotta Give."

Harry's younger woman at the moment is almost-30 Marin (lovely Amanda Peet), who's taking him out to her divorced mother's beach house in the Hamptons for a romantic weekend. But mom, aka Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), a well-known and extremely successful playwright, didn't know this and she's come to the house with her sister (Frances McDormand) for a quiet weekend.

Things go from awkward to omigod!! when Harry suffers a mild heart attack. The physician at the nearest hospital, hot young Dr. Julian Mercer (Keanu Reeves), wants Harry to stay close by for a few days, just in case. So Harry ends up the reluctant houseguest of the even more reluctant Erica.

In other words, irresistible force (him) meets immovable object (her). And as they say, something's gotta ...

One further complication: a smitten Dr. Julian has come courting.

But don't get too smug about what's bound to happen.

A lot of other things happen, too. Things you may not expect from an otherwise cozy comedy.

Writer-director Meyers knows how to make crowd-pleasers. She did it in the '80s, with her then-husband, Charles Shyer, with movies like "Private Benjamin" and "Baby Boom." She's done it on her own with the silly but charming "What Women Want."

There are a lot of laugh lines here - and they're not just in the stars' famous faces. At the hospital, Julian assures Marin her dad is going to be fine. Seeing her shocked expression, he quickly amends, "Sorry. I meant your grandfather."

It takes an immensely secure actor to agree to be the target of that kind of joke. With that patented devilish grin, Nicholson gleefully skewers his own aging-lech image. Harry is a potentially loathsome character, but Smilin' Jack doesn't just work to put Erica at ease; he puts us at ease, too.

Harry is a variation of Nicholson's Oscar-winning role in "Terms of Endearment." In fact, "Something's Gotta Give" can be seen as "Terms" lite. Except Shirley MacLaine's character isn't anything like Keaton's, which creates an entirely different romantic tension.

As Harry observes, there really isn't anyone remotely like Erica. Or Keaton. She's not an older Annie Hall; she never really was Annie Hall, though the Academy Awards and a zillion adoring acolytes insisted she was. She's always been far more complicated than that, far more centered.

In the movie, Keaton is much like the protagonist in Erica's new play: "a high-strung, controlling neurotic who's incredibly cute and lovable." Change cute to gorgeous and you've got Keaton. Or rather, Keaton has us, in the palm of her la-di-da hand.

"Something's Gotta Give" isn't as sharp as one might hope, and the actors start out too broadly, as if they don't want the audience to be bummed out by the movie's unhappy underlying truth.

Meyers doesn't always trust her audience enough, weaving in one safety net after another. She shouldn't worry so much. "Something's Gotta Give" can be formulaic, but watching the incandescent Nicholson and Keaton, all loose and funny and sharing jokes about reading glasses, is a rare treat. When the actors are this good, you can't help but leave the theater feeling good, too.