Watching "The Mirror Has Two Faces" is a little bit like riding that Gravitron thing at the local carnival: you know exactly what's going to happen, but you still hope that maybe, just this once, you won't get sick to your stomach. No such luck. Even though director Barbra Streisand tries so hard to spin it just the right way, when the credits roll out and Bryan Adams starts crooning, you're groaning along with everybody else in the theater.

"The Mirror Has Two Faces" knows exactly what it is--a cheesy romantic comedy--and it follows this classic, comforting formula to the letter: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy is an idiot, boy loses girl, boy and girl get back together. Streisand, however, adds her own 90's twist--no sex. This little curveball does exactly nothing to divert the film from the romantic formula, but, aside from discouraging most of the male audience, it does accomplish one other significant feat: It makes the movie a whole hell of a lot funnier.

Fortunately for everyone, the boy, girl and just about everybody else in "The Mirror Has Two Faces" happen to be played by very competent actors. Streisand herself plays Rose Morgan, an English professor at Columbia who knows the name of every single student in her 400 person lecture, and appears to be teaching a class entitled "My Personal Life 101." Rose is obviously a delicate flower indeed, witty and smart but resigned to the fact that she is just not that pretty, especially in comparison to her deliciously catty mother Hannah (Lauren Bacall) and sister Claire (Mimi Rogers). A cross between a hopeless romantic and a mental case, Rose cancels all her dates with the weirdos who pursue her, and instead lays around in pajamas eating cookies and watching baseball. Barbra has had a patent pending on this role for decades, and she plays it with ease and style and old-fashioned Jewish humor.

Her counterpart is the tongue-tied Gregory Larkin, a professor of mathematics at Columbia, superbly played by the scene-stealing Jeff Bridges. An academic and a pragmatist rather than a romantic, Gregory is totally overwhelmed by anything remotely related to sex, and literally swoons at the sight of a short skirt or a doe-eyed co-ed; Elle Macpherson, in a cameo as his ex-girlfriend, reduces him to a whimpering puddle without doing much more than blinking and smiling. Devastated by the failure of all his sexual relationships, Gregory decides that the sole route to true happiness is through intellectual stimulation alone, and places an ad in the newspaper to that effect. Sister Claire answers the ad for Rose, the two star-crossed non-lovers meet, and our fairy tale begins to pick up steam. But after some months of electrifying conversation and a mutual exchange of ideas, it becomes crystal clear that the plot can only be headed for that inevitable moment when Babs is going to put her foot down and demand to get it on.

Streisand does nothing new with the romantic comedy format, but she gets one thing right for sure: if she's going to cut out all the sex, then it damn well had better be funny. Thankfully, it is--"The Mirror Has Two Faces" has some of the sharpest one-liners around, mostly at the hands of the incredible supporting cast. Silver-screen legend George Segal is brilliant as Gregory's womanizing buddy, a suave and sarcastic anthropology professor who admittedly prefers T-and-A over IQ: "I gave my last girlfriend a copy of Farewell to Arms--she thought it was a diet book." Lauren Bacall is also superb as Rose's mother Hannah, an aging beauty whose wit is matched only by her savvy. Hannah is exceptionally good at her principal hobby--that is, making Rose feel not-that-pretty--and the time-honored Jewish tradition of guilt and sarcasm extends even to the most minor conversations. During Gregory's first evening with Hannah, Rose asks her mother to quit her interrogation and go prepare desert: "I've raised two daughters, I've buried a husband, I've made my coffee," she responds in perfect deadpan. Mimi Rogers is equally vicious and hilarious as Rose's sister, particularly toward her poor husband Alex; Pierce Brosnan is unerringly type-cast as the fawning millionaire hubby who just doesn't understand how his beautiful Claire can be such a monster.

Unfortunately, to get the jokes you have to sit through the schmaltz. That means scene after scene of Barbra gazing into the mirror, wishing, just wishing that she had been born beautiful like her mother and sister. Scene after scene of Barbra staring off into the distance, pining for someone who will know what type of toothpaste she uses, or how she likes her salad, with bad jazz surging from the Dolby THX surround-sound system and half the people in the theater moaning like they just had bad Chinese. For those hopeless romantics with the huge hearts and the iron stomachs, "The Mirror Has Two Faces" is definitely worth it. But for mere mortals, it may be a bit much to bear.