Starring Greg Kinnear and Lauren Holly Directed by Rated R, with adult content Running time 99 minutes We give this film a rating of 7 out of 10

(Aug. 22, 1997) -- The first thing you have to know about A Smile Like Yours is that it is a romantic comedy in which no one shouts. The characters speak in modulated voices. Sometimes they even murmur or whisper. Sometimes they have nothing to say at all.

Giving the punched-up tone of most modern comedies, big screen and small, Smile's easy-on-the-ears approach is a gleaming asset. And it's a movie that goes pleasingly against the pack in several other ways.

Greg Kinnear and Lauren Holly star as an ideal San Francisco couple who suffer the gross indignities of infertility tests and treatments in their effort to have the baby that she, especially, wants. The material is certainly up-to-the-minute, but the movie's approach couldn't be more pleasantly old-fashioned: tender, sweet and discreet, verging on chaste.

All the clinical poking and prodding and sampling eventually puts major stress on the marriage. But you know, from start to finish, that this is the kind of piece that's going to embrace romantic comedy's most revered convention -- the happy ending. Actually you're so intent on the endearing characters and the low-key humor of the individual anecdotes that you really don't pay much attention to plot.

Holly looks like a Laura Ashley model here and has a gentle manner to match. It masks a steely will and a streak of hard business sense that save her from wimpishness. She's a delight.

Kinnear is even more appealing. He plays the more ingenuous of the twosome, which means that he's the butt of most of the film's modest but pointedly suggestive visual gags both in the bedroom and at the clinic. He consistently underplays with wondrous results. He's adorable.

It is Kinnear's performance that defines the film's muted, gentle tone. First-time director Keith Samples (who also had a hand in the script) takes the gentility one step further, with equally pleasing results. Against a comic montage detailing the ever-more-gruesome-looking variations on a baster used during Holly's sessions at the clinic, for instance, Samples omits dialogue in favor of tinkly, bantering music. Where most comedies would go for a guffaw with that kind of material, Samples is going for a smile and sympathy. Lovely.

In addition to the two leads, who make the most comfortable-looking movie couple in recent memory, A Smile Like Yours prominently features ever-clever Joan Cusack as Holly's partner in the aroma therapy business and Jay Thomas (best known as Murphy Brown's unlikely right-wing lover) as Kinnear's colleague in the construction business. Thomas has the film's funniest riff on the subject of children, beginning with, "I'll give you one of mine."

Other notables: Christopher McDonald, making it a two-movie week as Ward Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver and a businessman with an interest in aroma therapy here; and an unbilled Shirley MacLaine, who has a high-impact bit-part as Kinnear's inquisitive mother.

At the end of one of the noisiest, most brutish movie seasons ever, A Smile Like Yours reminds you just how agreeable it is to spend an hour and a half in a theater without having to listen to one shouting match, one explosion or one obscenity.