Clocking in for some quality time with Mom.

Maid in Manhattan wears its Cinderella storyline on its sleeve. You've got your working class heroine, your wealthy bachelor, even a glamorous ball; I was surprised the climax didn't hinge on a discarded Manolo pump. The whole thing was completely predictable, which I expected to annoy me. And yet I found the movie to be utterly charming.

Jennifer Lopez stars as Marisa Ventura, a single mother who works as a maid in an elegant Manhattan hotel that admonishes its service staff to "strive to be invisible." Marisa generally succeeds in blending into the background, but one day she meets Chris Marshall (Ralph Fiennes), Senatorial candidate and America's only pro-environmental Republican. He's a guest at the hotel and, through a series of coincidences, thinks she is too. Marisa plays along with the charade, Chris is smitten and their blossoming relationship jeopardizes her efforts to get into the hotel's management trainee program.

Yeah, honey, that'll fit. Sure.

Like I said, pretty standard stuff and Maid in Manhattan can't be accused of breaking any new ground in romantic comedy. But it's well done romantic comedy and that makes all the difference. The script by Kevin Wade (Working Girl) is funny if not entirely fresh, and director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) wrings all the warmth and charm out of the material he can while somehow keeping it from getting too cloying.

The key to this kind of movie is the characters and their relationships, and Maid in Manhattan gives us two appealing leads. Ralph Fiennes is charismatic in a JFK Jr. kind of way as the playboy politician. He carries more of the romantic side of this romantic comedy, but when called upon to be funny he manages to pull that off as well. Jennifer Lopez turns in a nicely layered performance, balancing Marisa's easy confidence among her friends and family with the subservience she displays at work and the conflicting feelings she has about trying to rise above her station.

Tomorrow night Ben's having her dress up like a cheerleader.

The movie offers up some well-drawn supporting characters as well. I especially liked Stanley Tucci as Chris' hyper-vigilant campaign manager, Natasha Richardson as a self-centered hotel guest and Bob Hoskins as a fatherly butler. Marisa's sweet relationship with her son and the prickly one with her mother add some much needed shading to the chick flick formula. Unfortunately, they're balanced by some trite stereotypes. Marissa Matrone has some good moments but is annoyingly strident as Marisa's best friend. She and the other maids at the hotel amount to little besides a stale, "You go girl" cliché, and when they broke into song right before the straight-out-of-Pretty-Woman shopping scene . . . well, yuck.

Okay, so unless for some reason you've never seen a movie before, there's little here that will surprise you, and if the genre doesn't appeal to you I can't think of any reason why you'd want to see this movie. But sometimes a trite premise can be redeemed by lively execution, and Maid in Manhattan serves up enough warmth and charm to make up for its tried and true storyline.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3 out of 4 bananas