"Aw, Kevin Smith has grown up," is what I imagine the marketers of Jersey Girl want us to think as we head into his latest film, which features no appearences from Jay or Silent Bob or any language or scenarios that would impede upon the film's PG-13 rating. I guess they're expecting us to have forgotten that he made the very intelligent and very adult 'Chasing Amy' and the mostly intelligent and highly ambitious Dogma in between Clerks and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Bob, but I certainly haven't. This isn't Smith's first foray into non-puerile territory, nor is it his most adult film. It is, however, his most heartfelt, and I guess that counts for something, but I'll get to that in the last paragraph.

The film is about Smith and his experiences with fatherhood (if memory serves correct, his daughter Harley Quinn must be about three or four now). Of course, he's written himself as a character named Ollie Trinke (it is a great feat that this name somehow never calls attention to itself or becomes the subject of jokes), who is played by Smith's usual surrogate, Ben Affleck. Affleck is never better than when he's in Smith's films, and watching him here would make us forget all about him and J. Lo, except that J. Lo is in the movie too. She plays Ollie's wife, Gertrude, who dies in childbirth within the first ten minutes. Those ten minutes were originally more like twenty or thirty, from what I've read, and an opening narration has been provided to fill in any blanks and expedite her exit from the film, which, for what it's worth, almost manages to be pretty moving, given how little time we've had to get to know the characters; The Aimee Mann song on the soundtrack helps, which I think might be Smith's nod to Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, to make up for all the potshots he's made towards it in the past.

Ollie is a hotshot publicist, unprepared for fatherhood. After Gertrude's death, juggling a career and a daughter doesn't work out for him and he's fired from his agency after making some disparaging comments about the press in general and Will Smith in particular. Thus he winds up back at his dad's house in Jersey. Mr. Trinke is played by George Carlin, who acts his ages and doesn't mug much and is mostly very good.

All this happens circa 1995, and the film flashes forward to the present (which would have been last year, when the film was originally going to be released had not that infamous Affleck film that rhymes with 'really' come first). Ollie's little girl, also named Gertrude, has grown up into a lovely little girl played by newcomer Raquel Castro. She's as smart and cute as kids in these types of films usually are, but she doesn't look like a cookie cutter child and there's a natural awkwardness to her that pleasantly offsets her precociousness; furthermore, there's something about the way her eyes light up when she smiles that makes it clear why Smith cast her.

Smith directs in his usual endearingly sloppy style -- some shots go on too long, others not long enough; he directs with his ears more than his eyes, and he's never one to choose a dolly shot when a static two-shot will do. He takes steps to change this, mainly this by working with famed cinematographer Vilmos Szigmond, although the result is mostly that this looks glossier than his other films, which I'm not sure is a good thing, but would have been less of a problem if the writing had been better. His script here is very safe and surprisingly predictable; I thought Smith might throw a few monkeywrenches into the proceedings, but the film proceeds exactly as anyone who's seen the Nichlas Cage film The Family Man would expect. His familiar brand of humor is most evident in the delightfully ridiculous school play finale (itself a cliche, but a brilliantly twisted one), but there's no bawdyness or exchanges that his fans will be quoting for years to come.

One familiar sensiblity that does pervade this film is his frankness; there are some things that most family comedies would never consider including -- the dialogue that occurs the first time Ollie changes Gertie's diaper, or the scene where he catches her with a schoolmate, comparing private parts -- that could be mistaken for riskiness but are actually just acknowledgements of things that every parent deals with. There's also a scene where Ollie breaks down and yells some very mean things at Gertie that reminded me of the emotional rawness of Chasing Amy; for the most part, Smith has never been one to pull his punches.

The one other character of note in the film is Maya, played by Liv Tyler, a video store clerk and psychology grad student who takes a shine to Ollie when he rents a porno film from her store. If anything points to Smith's lack of maturity, it's this character, in which he's created every single father's dream woman: she's smart, funny, dotes on his daughter, makes the first move and is willing to have sympathy sex at the drop of a hat, which of course leads to the scene where Gertie catches the two of them in the act, thus bonding the three of them as a familial unit. Maya is a fantastic woman, a flawless angel, and I suppose its par for course in a film as standard as this one that she seems way too good to be true.

What saves the movie from complete mediocrity are the scenes between Ollie and Gertie. There's something to be said about the romantic nature of their relationship -- it's nothing to be alarmed about, and something that I'm certain every parent would recognize -- and there's a bit of reality in their conversations that transcends the movie. The rest of the script, I think, must have been filler for Smith; in these moments, it's clear that Ollie is him and he's telling his own daughter how she's the only thing that matters to him. The last shot of the film, in particular, is worth sitting through the rest of the film to get to. It's the work of a man whose found something far more important in his life than making movies.