WITH 50 PERCENT of American marriages ending in divorce these days and the threat of nuclear war rendering us powerless to control our own lives, it's always comforting to know that the people in Hollywood still live happily ever after. Sure, there are the Karen Silkwoods and the John Reeds who are victimized by circumstance, but what about E.T., Irene Cara, and the hundreds of other characters who emerge unscathed by it all?

The byproduct of this subtle attempt to pacify the American public by sheltering it from the harsh realities of life has producing a disturbing, though by no means novel, phenomenon: Americans prefer banal fantasies and mindless mush to unpleasant docudramas or serious theater. Consequently, when film and television producers make the rare attempt to simulate reality, they generally wind up depicting unconvincing, one-dimensional characters, creating predictable, non controversial situations, and producing stories like One Day at a Time or Happy Days.

The Buddy System, Glenn Jordan's latest contribution to Hollywood sap, is sadly more of the same. The movie comes complete with stock characters who spout cliches as often as brushing their teeth, and whose stock lines and insights render (surprise) stock solutions. All the same, director Jordan must be given some credit for taking the standard storyline of lonely male meets lonely female and giving it some comic embellishment.

Richard Dreyfuss, who plays a fledgling inventor/author doubling as an elementary school security guard to make ends meet, comes up with some pretty witty lines. Susan Sarandon complements him, as the neurotic failure who flunks her state court reporting test seven consecutive times and is left by a high-school sweetheart to raise a son. And of course, there's the star of it all, Sarandon's neglected nine-year-old son (Will Wheaton), who brings the two unlikely lovers together.

Yet from the film's opening scenes, where Sarandon burns toast and Dreyfuss battles with his talking scale, The Buddy System leaves little to the audience's imagination. We know before Wheaton ever meets his ideal father that Dreyfuss will play Daddy Warbucks and take the kid under his wing, and that Sarandon will become his new playmate. The plot ostensibly thickens when Dreyfuss's old girlfriend--a mindless blonde who parrots '60s cliches--returns. But the audience has little doubt that everything will somehow work out when the three are seen happily planting tomatoes in the garden.

One clear problem with The Buddy System is its lack of focus. The film vascillates between being a corny romance and the pitiable story of a friendless child, and never clearly decides which plot has the most appeal. Moreover, side issues like Sarandon's silent struggle to free herself from her mother (Jean Stapleton) are either given peripheral treatment or never fully developed at all. By the time the characters move towards resolving their crises, the audience has difficulty piecing together the tangential fragments of the story.

Dreyfuss and Stapleton attempt to compensate for much of the confusion created by the film's disjointed and cliche-ridden script and, to a great extent, are successful. Dreyfuss' depiction of the sex-hungry artist whose ambitions are constantly thwarted by his brainless girlfriend (Nancy Allen) make for some memorable moments. More notable is Stapleton, who potrays the archetypal needling grandmother who inevitably winds up alone. The scenes with Stapleton provide the best moments in the entire film.

YET EVEN WITH witticisms and highly skilled leads, the cast of The Buddy System cannot transcend the vapid world of cliche. For every unforgettable line that the screenplay offers us, there are ten others that sound as if they were borrowed from The Brady Bunch. We are constantly confronted with trite statements like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a real family and a father who went to work every day?", "I need time to explore my space," and "Love the things you can do well." By the end of the first 30 minutes, the movie sounds like little more than a collection of aphorisms propounded by a nine-year-old. When director Jordan occasionally does seize upon a bright idea, he usually destroys it by overstatement. There is nothing inappropriate, for example, about an aspiring artist like Dreyfuss having a Piet Mondrian painting adorning his wall. It is corny and implausible, however, for him to name his dog Balzac and give a Jersey Kosinski novel to a child who whines and calls his mother "monkey nose."

The film's failure to transcend conventional stereotype is as cumbersome as its reliance on stock gags and "cute" statements. Director Jordan's idea of humor--falling brooms and burning toast--is admittedly a sign of domestic chaos, but certainly an insufficient ploy to keep the audience in hysterics. Similarly, Wheaton's gratuitous use of slang phrases like "shit" and "knocked up" quickly becomes sophomoric and intellectually insulting to the audience.

All of this, of course, could have been less offensive if the film didn't attempt to take itself quite so seriously and was more successful at drawing laughs. But from the scenes where Dreyfuss talks about his work as a novelist to the moment where Sarandon liberates herself from the maternal clutches of Stapleton, one senses that The Buddy System is not merely a sappy romance, but an unsuccessful attempt at cautiously confronting contemporary issues. The characters repeatedly resort to grandiose gestures and profound philosophical statements when simple actions would suffice. Dreyfuss doesn't need literally to cast his manuscripts out to sea and let them blow in the wind to convince us that he is through with writing, just as Sarandon doesn't need to climb into bed with her son to convince us the world is unjust.

Perhaps the greatest failing of The Buddy System, then, is its inability to confine itself to what it ought to be--not a social commentary, not a forum for precocious nine-year-olds to assure their elders that "we're buddies," but a classical Dreyfuss romance. However, if you prefer The Brady Bunch reruns, this movie could offer some canned laughs.