Another step down the ladder for Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, Dead Poets Society); it’s hard to blame anyone else for this would-be romantic comedy (1990), because this time he’s writer-director-producer. For reasons best known to Weir, an uptight horticulturist in Manhattan (Andie MacDowell) agrees to help out the friend of a friend, a French composer (Gerard Depardieu), by marrying him so he can get a green card; then the two strangers have to take a crash course in each other when the immigration authorities become suspicious. As effective as MacDowell was in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, she’s clearly no match for the talented Depardieu (whose expressions manage to make up for his faltering command of English); perhaps she’d seem less out of her depth if the script wasn’t so implausible and threadbare. PG-13, 107 min. (JR)