Affair to Poor

A PHILOSOPHER with a viewfinder, Charles Cummings (Jon Cryer) snaps shots of everything from foreign freighters to flies on his school desk. "I once asked my mom where babies come from," he says, in a Risky Business-style internal monologue. "She told me one of the strangest stories I'd ever heard. It turned out to be true." With enough cheekiness to make him a funnier and more openly rebellious Joel Goodsen, No Small Affair could, indeed, be a funnier Risky Business: the tale of a camera, a boy, and his loss of innocence. Instead, the film becomes so clumsy that innocence is less lost than simply misplaced between attempts to capture the pop teen market with enlarged pinip posters of Laura (Demi Moore) and a "ssure-hit" soundtrack.

The one-time stand-in for Mathew Brodcrick on Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoris, Jon Cryer does his best comic work alone. "I once heard it said that if y ou stand in one place long enough, the world will pass you by. It's not true." "Have a girl, Chuck?" asks his "uncle" Ken, mom's live-in. "No thanks," he replies. "I'm full." Do all kids talk to their parents this way, mom asks, "I don't know. Most kids are too stoned to talk at all." And so on, Co-stars Peter Frenchettle, Jeffrey Tambor and Ann Wedgeworth, however able, can't match what starts as and should remain Cryer's one-man show.

That show makes No Small Affair enjoyable at first, as Charles and his ever-present camera walk aloof from romance. His brother Leonard (Frenchette) goes through enough girlfriends to make "finance" sound like a synonym for "Miss." Struggling to become something more than a straight (wo)man for Charles's barbs, his mother sticks to her live-in "Uncle" Ken. "I hope you're planning to marry her," Charles tells mom's shaving-cream-adorned amour, "you know it's the only decent thing to do." Uncle Jake calls it Charles's attitude problem, romanties call it cynicism, but it all adds up to the end of innocence.

Laura (Demi Moore) enters the picture as a block in Charles's viewfinder: she's standing in front of a boat he wants to photograph. In person, she stirs Charles about as much as if she were his lens cap, or maybe a free. But somewhere between the wharf and the darkroom, her photo becomes something more. Out a mix of photo dots. Lawra becomes line Love, the antuhesis to the cheap sex hunger pains of Charles's brother.

Brother I conard wants to take him to a topless club: Charles would rather dive into a bed covered with Laura's pictures. An amateur philosopher, Leonad pontificates. "Look, sex has nothing to do with love: you can wash off sex," but Charles asks only to take Laura's picture with her clothes on, Leonard gets Charles a hooker, and the high school photo addict asks only for a hug.

Have we met the Great Modern Romantic? Hardly. A poet he may be, but not a Poe writing of the loss of his wife. He's another Keats hymning a Greek urn, not because Charles seeks a relationship deeper than with the hooker he hugs, but because Laura, like the urn, stirs some aesthetic last.

A two-year veteran of General Hospital. Demi Moore plays Laura with the depth of a pinup poster. She is at her best when actually posing while Charles snaps her picture against one San Francisco landmark after another. Let her open her mouth and the pinup becomes a comic-strip character, the perfect addition to Judge Parker land.

To fill the space between the extended pinup sequences and Charle's nonstop social commemary, Laura tells her own story. The poster manages to say a few words. She wants to sing, but her lead guitar has departed for L.A., leaving her stranded without a band and without a gig.

Cryer could probably carry No Small Affair nonetheless, but he gets none of the cinematic support that made the management case study of an aspiring businessman in "human satisfaction" into a success in Risky Business. Where that film, for instance, used exaggerated shots to distort Joel's parents visually, matching their distortion in the mind of the aspiring pimp, here Director of Photography Vilmos Zsigmond displays none of the visual creativity he and steven Spiclberg brought to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is as if he simply ran the production like a Broadway show and set up a single camera in front of the stage. Whenever the film cuts out of a modeling session, it returns Cryer and Company to what might as well be a small stage.

A small stage, that is, where someone has thoughtlessly left his boom box blaring in the background. "Love," the lyrics offer, "makes you go blind." Here, No Small Affair joins a host of recent movies-from Footloose to Flashdance to The Last American Virgin-that have tried to squeeze some plot in between blaring bids for Top 40 exposure.

No Small Affair begins as the chronicle of an obsession but insists on dragging Charles beyond that, Charles could easily stay a cynic, pick up Joel's sunglasses, and say, every now and then, what the... But it cannot. Fantasy cannot be allowed to stay fantasy. (Last summer's Oxford Blues, for all the brashness of Nick (Rob Lowe) could at least keep that line clear. His love, a model spotted by a different lens, purred. "It was a wonderful night, but it was only a night. But we can still be friends." Said a pouting Nick: "You were never my friend. You were my dream.")

Pity the poor Virginias of our time who sit through No Small Affair. They can watch one of the best aspiring comic actors of our time put up with a fantasy that never goes away. Imagine the letter Virginia would get in Charles's particular version of the Hollywood world. "Dear Virginia: there is a Sama Claus. And you can have a date and a meaningful relationship with him this Thursday." Clerk J. Freshman