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By Dan Leone

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THERE WAS A brief time in the '70s when, if your only contact with American society was through contemporary film and literature, you'd swear that the United States was mostly composed of New York's Upper East Side. The tweed-coat set and neurotic man-children of that heyday still get lip service from Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, and the New Yorker, but zeitgeist-wise, they can hardly claim preferred seating at Elaine's anymore. Gary Winick's Tadpole would, in a perfect world, restore the inhabitants of that occasionally grainy-lensed, sometimes Gershwin-soundtracked cultural gestalt to center stage, but for now it'll have to make do with being the freshest sex farce in ages. Fifteen-year-old budding intellectual Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford), nicknamed "Tadpole" (no "Portnoy," but it will do), comes home from boarding school to celebrate Thanksgiving with his history professor dad in Manhattan. His main interest in the holiday homecoming, however, involves a monster crush he's nursing for his middle-age stepmother (Sigourney Weaver). Complications arise when Oscar's seduction by his stepmom's best friend (Bebe Neuwirth) threatens to derail his own Oedipal courtship. Shot in dusty-looking digital video and focusing on a precocious teen pining for an older woman, it's tempting at first to dismiss Tadpole as a low-rent Rushmore. But the hyperintelligent writing and wit (when was the last time you watched a funny film liberally sprinkled with Voltaire quotes?) overcomes the cruder, clumsier technical moments to make this upper-crust comedy of manners move; picture Jules Feiffer and Whit Stillman penning a hormonal teen flick, and you're in the right borough. Add in some timing-perfect turns from Weaver, Neuwirth, and John Ritter (yes, you read that right), and it's hard not to fall under Tadpole's time-capsule, East Coast-sophisticate spell of seduction. (David Fear)