Tripping over its own good intentions, "Tiptoes" is a comedic drama in which the relationship of a handsome firefighter (Matthew McConaughey) and his pregnant painter fiancée (Kate Beckinsale) may be derailed by the belated revelation that dwarfism runs in his family. In fact, he's the only one of them over four feet tall. But when Beckinsale takes all this in stride and it's McConaughey who seems unnerved by the possible implications for their child, the film is exposed as a patronizing anti-discrimination parable, full of simplistically pat-on-the-head dialogue like, "But that's what life is all about -- dealing with hardship. If a person can't deal with that, they can't ever be happy."

Writer Bill Wiener and director Matthew Bright (who apparently lost his sense of irony sometime after the terrifically trashy 1996 indie "Freeway") seem so determined to depict the normalcy of this family's life (pausing occasionally for frank acknowledgement of inherent medical problems) that by default the story's most interesting characters are peripheral eccentrics. Gary Oldman is the quiet emotional core of the film as McConaughey's stunted, melancholy twin brother (he's made to look smaller with seamless force-perspective camera techniques), and Peter Dinklage ("The Station Agent") shines as an angry, French rebel-Marxist dwarf with a normal-sized, spaced-out hippie girlfriend (Patricia Arquette).