Smith shows his softer side with ‘Jersey Girl’

Here’s something you don’t see in every Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler movie: the stars of “Armageddon” performing a musical number from Stephen Sondheim’s savage musical, “Sweeney Todd.”

It happens toward the end of Kevin Smith’s “Jersey Girl,” and it’s one of the few unexpected touches in a sentimental, overly familiar comedy-drama about the joys of parenthood, the frustrations of workaholic dads and the necessity of spending time with the kids.

Affleck and Tyler end up performing the number in order to please his 7-year-old daughter, Gertie (Raquel Castro), who falls in love with the show when dad takes her to a Broadway performance. She chooses to recreate the experience at her school, recruiting them to perform it with her.

The song is handled with such affection and style that it suggests the writer-director of “Clerks” and “Dogma” might just be a closet Sondheim fan. Or maybe it’s just because he can’t stand “Cats,” which is the clear favorite with Gertie’s classmates — and the target of several barbs in the script.

Affleck plays Ollie Trinke, a slick Manhattan publicist who loses control when his wife, played by Jennifer Lopez, dies in childbirth in the movie’s first 15 minutes (so much for the Bennifer factor). He tries to go back to work, taking the infant Gertie with him, but instantly goes down in flames when he publicly insults not only the press but one of his clients.

The offended client is Will Smith, whom Ollie dismisses as a two-bit TV actor; the year is 1994, and Ollie is confident that Smith will never have a movie career. Years later, this makes Ollie a legendary rebel, “a God” in the eyes of a couple of other flaks (Matt Damon, Jason Lee), though he’s still too hot to handle another publicity job.

In the meantime, Ollie has become a model father, moving in with his dad (George Carlin) to raise Gertie in the New Jersey suburb where he grew up. When a video clerk (Tyler) offers herself as an alternative to the porn he’s been renting, one thing leads to another and soon they’re rehearsing Sondheim hymns to homicide.

With Sondheim and Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack and Vilmos Zsigmond handling the cinematography, “Jersey Girl” looks and sounds classier than most Smith vehicles, but it’s not entirely a good thing that the rawness of his earlier films is missing. Some scenes come perilously close to third-rate Neil Simon, and Gertie’s kids-say-the-darndest-things utterances mostly come off as cute and overly polished. Castro works hard to make her lines sound natural, but they almost always feel scripted.

It doesn’t help that Affleck seems out of his depth with the grieving-husband scenes; neither his tears nor his tantrums are convincing. He’s more comfortable when the character lightens up, flirting with Tyler, kidding around with Carlin or sharing a karmic revelation with the real Will Smith. The movie comes together at this moment, essentially justifying the coincidences and contrivances that lead up to it.

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