CINEMA: SAY AMEN! SAY AWWW!

If all angels looked this good and dressed this baaad, it would be as hard to get into heaven as into an all-star rap concert. Denzel Washington, an angel on loan to a fretful preacher (Courtney B. Vance) and his pretty wife (Whitney Houston), is really here to sell the miracle of star quality. In his gorgeous silver three-piece suit, Washington makes niceness sexy. His fellow teachers in this charm-school film are Houston, with her 60 beautiful teeth; old pro Jenifer Lewis as the requisite sassy grandma and, in the Grinch role, Gregory Hines, his magnificently phony smile romanticizing each act of venality.

Alas, there’s a story to slog through: how the preacher must learn to trust his own and his parishioners’ best instincts. And that means, in the script by Nat Mauldin and Allan Scott, endless scenes of perfunctory angst. Vance, who has more screen time than either of the big stars, is required to play it slow and sullen. This leads director Penny Marshall into strategies alternately depressive and manic. She trails dutifully after the dour preacher, then binges on cuteness: a lisping kid’s radiance, say, followed by a reaction shot of adoring adults going “Awww.” The audience is so many Strasbourg geese, force-fed treacle.

When she’s not wading through this noble sludge, Houston puts on a fine show. Lord knows she has the pipes, leading the choir or crooning a galvanic I Believe in You and Me. The pity is that Marshall believed less in movie glamour and more in plodding plot.

–By Richard Corliss