Besides, he’s more than a little in love with his own boozy, grandiloquent self-destructiveness. He’s good at failure: he can be a charming local legend without the responsibility of accomplishment. Then he meets Dr. Molly Griswold (Rene Russo), a long-legged psychotherapist who comes to him for a lesson, and suddenly he has a reason to go for it big time. He wants to win her; when he finds out she’s already attached to the smarmy Simms, he wants her so bad he’s roused to compete for the U.S. Open.
The good news about the amiable but only partly satisfying ““Tin Cup’’ is that it frees Kevin Costner from playing a monument and restores to us the loose, sparkling comic actor he used to be. His sly, ardent, funny-sexy performance keeps this comedy humming, and he’s backed up beautifully by Cheech Marin as Romeo, Roy’s buddy-guru-caddie. The not-so-good news is that Russo’s flustered, ditsy doctor doesn’t hold up her end of the romantic bargain. Russo, who sizzled with Clint Eastwood in ““In the Line of Fire,’’ never gets a handle on her character, in part because Shelton and co-writer John Norville haven’t either. Where Roy seems flesh and tainted blood, Molly seems pieced together from brittle, defensive tics borrowed from a hundred other romantic comedies. But if you can overlook the missing chemistry at the heart of ““Tin Cup,’’ there are lots of pungent pleasures along the way to the final green, where Shelton, with his usual contrarian wit, turns the convention of happy sports-movie endings on its head and still manages to make you happy.
