City of Angels will probably be a commercial success; it’s a Love Story for the millennium. Like both Love Story and Titanic, this film is about doomed love. Unlike those blockbusters, Angels layers its subject with high-concept musings on the afterlife, and does not require viewers to sit through a two-hour Ali McGraw performance, or watch repeated examples of James Cameron’s talent for turning 30-second action/suspense scenes into numbing, five-minute, seemingly time-lapsed stretches of water-logged redundancy. Also, to its credit, and for all its vague philosophizing, City of Angels at least raises some important questions for viewers. The film’s claim to success is its function as a cautionary tale, a reminder that eternity is now and that love must never be taken for granted.

The film has a lot going for it, beginning with the cast. Meg Ryan is Dr. Maggie Rice, an extremely skilled and extremely driven heart surgeon. When she loses confidence in her technique after losing a patient through no medical fault or discernible reason, she is forced to confront the possibility that doing everything right does not always put you in charge, that there are larger mysteries and designs than may be found in science. Cage plays Seth, an angel who is sent to the operating room to accompany the patient Maggie loses. Seth falls in love with Maggie and eventually learns that angels, like human beings, have “free will” and may choose to “fall” from their bloodless but celestially eternal life to live a mortal existence. The majority of the film is concerned with the differences between things corporeal and spiritual, angels and humans. Seth’s decision-making and Maggie’s awakening eventually lead the two to meet halfway. (It may not be St. Augustine, Paul Tillich, or Kierkegaard, but it’s not as offensive as seeing half the bins at every bargain store in America crammed with tawdry “angel ware.”)

Cage’s performance is mannered but, in the end, winning. At first, Seth’s tentativeness and innocence in trying to comprehend the human experience seem stagy, a bit affected; but, like his similarly stylized, and similarly fine, work in Moonstruck, the portrayal accrues credibility and passion as it builds. The subtlety and quiet confidence of this performance, its capacity for shifting elegantly from real gravity to delicate humor, proves that Cage is one of the most intelligently adventurous actors in American movies today.

Ryan is as watchable as ever. In Dana Stevens’ script, Maggie’s spiritual birth is fill-in-the-blanks at best, and a less appealing actress might not have skirted the appearance of shallow self-absorption. Ryan, quite simply, is a movie star. She is talented, though her range and depth are still in question; but it is her love affair with the camera that, almost always, can carry a film. In Angels, Ryan and Cage strike a fine balance between their styles and rhythms that seems almost, well, ethereally right. (Something about their scenes – he doing a slow burn and she all no-nonsense – feels like a postmodern channeling of Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn.) The supporting cast – especially Dennis Franz as one of Maggie’s patients and Colm Feore as her hospital colleague and suitor – is also excellent.