Sarah Huttinger (Jennifer Aniston) and her fiancé Jeff (Mark Ruffalo) are on their way from New York to Pasadena for the wedding of Sarah's younger sister, Annie (Mena Suvari). And Sarah is dreading it. She loves her family but has always felt like the black sheep. She doesn't go in for the country club lifestyle – she doesn't even like tennis. And unlike her bouncy sister, Sarah isn't delirious at the prospect of marriage. In fact, and much to Jeff's concern, she doesn't even want to tell her family about their engagement.

Once home in stuffy Pasadena , Sarah finds the company and caustic humour of her grandmother Katherine (Shirley MacLaine) a breath of fresh air. But when Katherine lets slip that Sarah's mother (who died when she was a child) had a passionate fling with a young man named Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) just days before her wedding, Sarah, who was born just nine months after her parents' marriage, does the math.

Katherine seems to know more about Beau than she is willing to let on. And then there's that old rumour – that The Graduate (1967) was actually based on a real Pasadena family, and that the lead character Benjamin Braddock was inspired by a real young man from Pasadena. Could this mysterious man be her father? And if not that, then could he be something else to her? Sarah puts aside her inhibitions, and her patient fiancé Jeff, to embark on a reckless journey of self-discovery.

Having won such acclaim for her performance in Friends it must be tempting for Aniston to reprise her ditzy, man-worried Rachel Green persona, and for directors to cast her in this guise. Yet it's hard to imagine Aniston as the black sheep of even the most squeaky-clean all-American family. Nonetheless, she charms her way through implausible situations and delivers the lacklustre dialogue with an energy and sparkle that gives a hint of how much more she would be capable of if given the opportunity. When Sarah finds herself drawn into ridiculously incestuous love quadrangle she snaps: “This isn't The Graduate . It's Deliverance !”, but the laughs are few and far between. And the romance doesn't fair much better.

While 96 minutes should more than suffice for the scant character sketches needed to drive such a conventional romantic comedy, director Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally…, Stand By Me) neglects the development of Sarah, Jeff and Beau, in favour of set-piece situation-driven episodes – a wedding, a business conference, an exclusive charity ball. These scenes are given some flair by the extravagant production design of Tom Sanders (Bram Stoker's Dracula, Saving Private Ryan) who constructs a nice contrast between the cloying claustrophobia of the Huttingers' moneyed but nonetheless parochial Pasadena and the refreshing beauty of Beau's palatial beachfront mansion. But it's empty spectacle, which fails to conceal the threadbare story and characters. We learn that Sarah is an obituary writer – a nice touch, as the rest of the movie revolves around the circumstances of her birth and the looming prospect of marriage, but we learn very little more. Sarah's dilemma, such as it is, is whether to settle with the solid but unadventurous Jeff, or take a chance with the relatively more exciting, but almost pensionable, Beau – Reiner never poses the question of whether she might do neither. And at the end it is not easy to be confident that she has made the right choice.

The promise of the premise – ‘what if The Graduate were based on a real family?' – is unfulfilled, inspiring little but the occasional throwaway reference. Shirley MacLaine is well cast as a Mrs Robinson for the 90s (Rumour Has It is set in 1997) and earns several good lines: “ Pasadena . That's what you get when you give people everything they want and leave them alone for a hundred years.” But the intriguing sexuality of the 1967 classic, which paired then newcomer Dustin Hoffman with the older but fabulous Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), is replaced with an all too familiar young woman/older man pairing. They say there's no smoke without fire but despite brief sparks between Costner and Aniston, Reiner's updating of The Graduate is a pretty damp squib. This rumour has had it.