Associated Press

Los Angeles:

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are back, but it’s Affleck’s show with ‘Jersey Girl’

The tabloid beast known as Bennifer rears its head on the big screen again. Yet Kevin Smith wants you to know, he kills off Jennifer Lopez’s character minutes into ‘Jersey Girl’. Filmmakers usually decry blabbermouths who reveal movie secrets, but writer-director Smith and distributor Miramax are quick to acknowledge Lopez’s demise, a twist they had hoped to keep hidden.

The reason: The lingering cloud of box-office carbon monoxide left by ‘Gigli’, last summer’s bomb that was the first pairing of Lopez and real-life sweetie Ben Affleck.

A year or two ago, the prospect of Lopez and Affleck together on screen sounded like music to a studio executive’s ears. Then came the media farce over their on-again, off-again nuptials, culminating in gleefully harsh reviews of their mob comedy ‘Gigli’, a $54 million production that earned back just $6 million at theatres.

A long, slow anticlimax followed, as Affleck and Lopez called off their September wedding at the last minute and rumours flew about the status of their relationship. They finally called off their engagement in January.

Everyone involved wants to distance the new flick from ‘Gigli’, so they’re taking an unusual tack for Hollywood and selling ‘Jersey Girl’ truthfully for what it is: A goodhearted story of a widower (Affleck) struggling to put his life back together while raising a little girl on his own. Lopez plays Affleck’s wife and dies in childbirth within the first 15 minutes.

“I never would have wanted to do a bait-and-switch and sell it as a Ben-and-Jen movie, then have people suddenly get irate when she dies so early,” said Smith, who earlier directed Affleck in ‘Chasing Amy’, ‘Dogma’, ‘Mallrats’ and ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’.

Affleck hopes enough time has passed so audiences can view ‘Jersey Girl’ on its own merits. “‘Gigli’ was a movie that definitely suffered from the surfeit of publicity about me and Jen. So it was kind of, ‘Enough already,’ before the movie came out,” Affleck said. “Also ‘Gigli’, while it was a great experience and while I had a great time making it, didn’t really, ultimately work as a movie, and ‘Jersey Girl’ really does. It’s a beautiful movie, and I’m really proud of it.”Affleck plays Ollie Trinke, a crack Manhattan music publicist who meets and marries the woman of his dreams, Gertrude Steiney (Lopez). After Gertrude’s death giving birth to their daughter, Gertie (Raquel Castro), Ollie’s professional life crumbles and he finds himself back in New Jersey, licking his wounds at the home of his father (George Carlin).Liv Tyler co-stars as Ollie’s new romantic interest, but the heart of the story is the father-daughter attachment, inspired by Smith’s relationship with his own daughter.

To hold the focus squarely on Affleck as a single father, Smith truncated the opening, deleting scenes to reduce the romance and marriage of Affleck and Lopez to a whirlwind montage.

‘Jersey Girl’ is the most grown-up film yet for Smith, whose first movie ‘Clerks’ put him at the vanguard of the 1990s wave of young independent filmmakers. The new movie has plenty of Smith’s trademark but on a mature level.

With its $35 million budget ($10 million for Affleck’s salary and $4 million for Lopez’s), ‘Jersey Girl’ is less of a risk than ‘Gigli’. The ‘Jersey Girl’ posters show Affleck with crossed arms, looking down at Castro in a paternal staring match. Miramax hopes that image lingers over any groans of “Ben and Jen again”.