What If?

Half the movies in existence don't depend on audiences wondering what will happen but how it will happen. This is the case with most crime films, almost all action films and at least 99 percent of romantic comedies.

Of these, the rom-coms are the most fascinating, because they rely not on danger, effects or thrills, but on the inherent appeal of two actors, the charm of them in combination and the odd good will of spectators who really care -- who await the triumph of love as though they have a personal stake.

What If doesn't break any new ground in love stories, but something about it feels fresh all the same.

It takes place in Toronto, not the faux New York Toronto we often see in movies, but a romantic city with a Chicago-like skyline and lots of open space.

It brings together (more or less) Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, who have two big advantages: (1) They're appropriately young (too many romantic comedies have 40-year-olds acting like they're 25); and (2) They're just idiosyncratic and imperfect enough in their looks and manners that we can believe in them as individuals and make the emotional investment.

The movie, which won the Canadian screen award for best adapted screenplay, was released in Canada last year under the title The F Word, the "F" in this case referring to that most dreaded word of all ... "friend."

Radcliffe is Wallace, who meets Chantry (Kazan), and their immediate bantering rapport bespeaks the kind of connection that might never get old. But Chantry has a perfectly nice boyfriend (Rafe Spall) with a glamorous career, and so Wallace is put in the friend zone -- at first willingly, then less so.

From here, you can probably write the rest of the story yourself, but the extra quality of magic -- that's the hard part. Somehow What If creates drama, interest and longing just by placing the characters near each other.

And something in the way director Michael Dowse presents them makes us see the two through each other's eyes, as the embodiment of everything worth having.

Radcliffe, who has been flirting with adulthood in his recent screen outings, arrives as a wry, unconventionally handsome leading man. And Kazan is radiant.

They are the serious (potential) couple -- diminutive, cautious, sincere -- and they are supported here by a tall, wild, funny couple, played by Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis.

The forthright couple flanked by zanies -- this has been a classic pattern dating all the way back to 1930s musicals, Much Ado About Nothing, and beyond. That's fine. Patterns become cliches only when they're misused.

Other familiar patterns on display include convenient business trips and the intrusion of major life choices, but these don't feel like conveniences of the script so much as emblems of a time in life when big decisions must be made.

What If misuses only one romantic comedy cliche, the most pernicious of all: It tries to pump up the tension by inserting a completely meaningless and unbelievable argument. It's a particular misstep here, because it necessitates making reasonable characters unreasonable and communicative characters uncommunicative. For a short but irritating stretch, the whole movie gets wrenched into a place of falsehood.

Fortunately, What If rights itself well before the finish and finds its way back to the truth and the light.

MovieStyle on 08/15/2014