If you believe that the sweetly beautiful Helen Hunt (age 34) could find her soul mate in the smarmily curmudgeonly Jack Nicholson (age 60), then you may also believe that this end-of-the-year romance is a worthy candidate for the Jerry Maguire berth at this year's Oscars.

I only say that because this tale of male redemption/romantic comedy has Jerry Maguire written all over it, in large letters. The romantic interest is a good-looking single mom with a sickly (but adorable) young child who becomes dependent on her male co-star for more than just her finances. She lives with her mother, who takes care of the kid and, like the sister in Jerry Maguire, offers guidance in matters of the heart. It relies on that Jerry Maguire trick of bringing the two romantic leads together, and then pushing them apart, and then bringing them together again, and then ... you know. In what can only be a bizarre coincidence, it shares Jerry Maguire's Oscar-baiting running time of 138 minutes. And Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire) shows up in a supporting role.

Director and co-writer James L. Brooks was actually one of the producers of Jerry Maguire, which perhaps speaks to some of the similarities between this script and Cameron Crowe's (Mark Andrus's original story for As Good As It Gets has reportedly been kicking around for years). The sameness doesn't bother me per se, although it does engender a bracing sense of deja vu in the movie theater. Me, I feel like Cameron Crowe's soul mate, since I loved almost everything about Jerry Maguire, right down to the pop songs on the soundtrack. (And in the spirit of full disclosure, I've got to note that I'm no Brooks fan, so adjust my rating above according to taste.) But if you thought Jerry Maguire was too earnest or superficial -- or if you just hate Tom Cruise -- you may well find As Good As It Gets to be the Yang to that movie's Yin.

Where Jerry Maguire gave us Bruce Springsteen's dreamy "Secret Garden," As Good As It Gets offers Art Garfunkel (no kidding!) singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (the Eric Idle song from the big crucifixion number at the end of Monty Python's Life of Brian) over the end credits. Earlier in the film, Nicholson's Melvin Udall tinkles that tune out on the piano in his last-ditch effort to get his gay neighbor's dog to eat the meal he's painstakingly constructed for it. Nicholson sings, and the pooch chows down.

The humor, of course, comes from the fact that Melvin Udall is already a well-established misanthropist. He hates his gay neighbor, Simon (Greg Kinnear), a downtown artist type. He hates his gay neighbor's dog, Verdell. He hates his gay neighbor's (art) dealer, Frank (Gooding). And he's especially put out when Frank, partly to get back at Melvin for his nastiness, insists that Melvin take care of the dog when Simon is hospitalized after walking in on a robbery in progress. Call him Scrooge, and you'll have a good sense of what's going on here. And if you guess that he starts to care about the dog in spite of himself, you'll be right.

Melvin Udall is also a novelist, and he specializes in syrupy romances that either belie the tender heart beneath his rough exterior or prove his contempt (spiked with envy) for people who have actually found happiness in their lives. One of the few things besides writing that does seem to give Melvin pleasure is his daily appearance at a local cafe, where he brings his own set of plastic silverware (germs, no doubt) and enjoys the attention of waitress Carol (Hunt), who can barely stand him. On a morning when Carol doesn't show up for work, Melvin first abuses the fill-in waitress and then storms out of the restaurant, giving a bus boy a 20 in exchange for Carol's last name. Next thing you know, Melvin's in a cab headed for Carol's Brooklyn dwelling.

This is, of course, the stuff of a movie about a deranged stalker. Melvin's surprise arrival at Carol's home is a pretty creepy linchpin for a romantic comedy, and the movie almost loses any mooring in reality when she fails to slam the door in his face and call the police immediately. Then again, this is a New York story, and the grudging relationship that begins to form between them -- solidified when Melvin takes the step of arranging to pay the costs of treatment for Carol's ill son -- is just unlikely enough that you believe it could happen in New York.

But in New York, it wouldn't take nearly this long. There's a pretty charming comedy embedded somewhere inside this material, but it drags. Given that a happy ending is more or less a foregone conclusion, I wish the screenplay had taken a more direct route to get there. Yes, many of the jokes are funny, and yes, some of the dialogue verges on brilliance -- especially the tricky business of making Melvin and Carol seem right for each other. (Kinnear's performance has been singled out for particular praise, but to me most of the business he was stuck with felt like pure soap opera.) As shot, the film could have used a good trim.

Still, I should admit that Nicholson's and Hunt's scenes together did put a big smile on my face. Hunt is a little too uneven to call this a real breakthrough, but when she's playing off Nicholson she shines in her own right, especially when the two of them sit down for a nearly romantic dinner in a scene that ends in an emotional crash and burn.

Nicholson, meanwhile, has a devillishly good time with a performance that riffs cannily on his own reputation (while the movie was going, I started thinking of it as Deconstructing Jack). His racist, sexist, and homophobic tirades are defused somewhat by the mountain of goodwill that Nicholson's presence brings to the film, but they trade on the hard-as-nails presence he's crafted over the course of a career. The question is whether the notoriously stony Nicholson really has a soft underbelly. And when his brazen demeanor cracks, as it does when Melvin struggles to explain himself to Carol, it cracks with the force of our many years' familiarity with his ways. Given the subject matter of the film, I think Nicholson manages the estimable task of turning in a performance that criticizes itself.

Even so, I'm not quite ready to believe that this Melvin character is ready for a stable relationship. Simply put, he gets off way too easy. Scrambling for its happy ending, As Good As It Gets ties each of its loose ends into a neat little bow. The result is pretty on the outside, but its beauty is paper-thin. A messier package would feel more like real life.