_Speechless_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Ron Underwood's _Speechless_ uses supposedly current affairs as a we're-so-hip-it- hurts framework for an oppressively mundane story. Kevin (Michael Keaton, who makes some very funny faces here) meets Julia (Geena Davis) at a drugstore, where they agree to split the last bottle of Nyquil. They're insomniacs, you see, because they're both anxious speechwriters for political candidates. Competing candidates, as it turns out, which means they then have to go through some regular plot gyrations: they fight, they make up, they fight. The movie devolves into a kind of Hepburn-Tracy wannabe, a la _I Love Trouble_ and via the Carville-Matalin liaison. Affably cynical Kevin is a former speechwriter, called from his sitcom-writing job into the political fray by his ex-wife (Bonnie Bedelia - and what is she doing here? where's John McClane when you need him?), who's managing the Democratic candidate's campaign. Julia -by contrast - is an ambitious idealist (she really believes that politics is about social change), writing for the Republican (her immediate superiors include Ernie Hudson, with a goatee - and what is _he_ doing here?). She's also somewhat distracted by her fiance, an egocentric superstar-reporter called Baghdad Bob (Christopher Reeve, pretty perfect as the wooden, self-involved Bob), who convinces her for a minute that he's more stable than he is. I suppose one could argue that the movie is about this search for stability and commitment, or rather, the articulation of this search. How ironic! These speechwriters seem unable to say what they mean (especially the guy, but isn't that always the way?). All of this - especially the banality - is emminently transferable to the political arena, so yeah, _Speechless_ could be about the travails of contemporary romance, dressed up in occasionally witty dialogue: poor Kevin, all he needs to do is be sensitive and say out loud that he loves her; poor Julia, all she needs to do is ease up on her careerism (someone calls her a "campaignosaurus''). What makes any of this remotely interesting (to talk about, if not to watch), are the film's choice of targets, at once nostalgic and too close to current news. The easy marks are extremely easy: the media inflation of a bear-trapped-in-a-hole story is milked for all it's not worth. Another episode makes links among Tarzan, Perot, televangelism, sumu wrestling, a train wreck, and a political debate. And, of course, both candidates are crooked dimwits. (To exact vengeance for something Julia's done, Kevin substitutes "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah'' for her candidate's teleprompter speech, and - oh my god! - the dolt reads it anyway. And guess what? It doesn't make a bit of difference in the campaign.) The central what-were-they-thinking? plot device has to do with the candidates' conflict is over U.S. borders. Kevin's guy calls the proposed, literal hole in the ground "The Friendship Ditch,'' a literal border between Mexico and New Mexico that Julia's guy opposes. Neither of these stands has anything to do with conviction; and the joke is based in how badly they mess up what their writers have given them to say. And yet such dickering for the "barrio vote'' can't help but refer to Proposition 187. Maybe this is inadvertent. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.