Although no doubt a distant second to Italy as a destination, Greece apparently provides much of the same source of appeal for the Anglo-Saxon traveler as its Mediterranean cousin. Its remarkable history as the birthplace of Western civilization, the cradle of democracy, the crumbling monuments of its ancient past, its unparalleled gifts of science, art, literature, and philosophy naturally explain its attraction for any tourist. As the romantic comedy "My Life in Ruins" suggests, however, like Italy, contemporary Greece also throbs with passion, the allure of a sensual awakening for the sober and repressed visitor from the West (tellingly, "Zorba the Greek" plays on TV sets throughout).

Following a long tradition in English and American literature and film, the picture suggests the transforming power of the encounter between two very different cultures, a subject that fascinated artists as varied as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence. To dramatize that encounter, the script employs the point of view and occasional voice-over narrative of Nia Vardalos, who plays Georgia, a Greek-American professor of philosophy working (temporarily, she hopes) as a tour guide.

Passionate herself about the culture of the country, Georgia guides her groups through museums and temples, lecturing on the magnificent achievements of ancient Greece, the splendor of its history. Her boss tells her that most of her clients regard those lectures and her tours as tedious and unsatisfying, preferring instead to eat ice cream, visit the beaches, and shop for tawdry souvenirs. Much of the film's comedy results from the tension between Georgia's efforts to educate her clients and her clients' firm resistance to anything resembling learning.

A generally unattractive assemblage of assorted types, the tour group itself resembles one of those Hollywood bomber crews, infantry platoons, or baseball teams. Georgia knows too well the assortment of difficult people she must herd through history, among them the inevitable Australian, who drink beer constantly and babbles cheerfully in incomprehensible Aussie; a pair of loud Americans; a boring executive from the International House of Pancakes; a stuffy, snooty English couple; a fat frat boy; two divorcees on the prowl; and most important, Irv (Richard Dreyfuss), whom she dubs Mr. Funny, the class clown who bedevils every tour guide with jokes and wisecracks.

Once it establishes that situation and the cast of oddballs, the script follows a most familiar route, with repeated instances of Georgia's failure to instruct or delight her charges, and a series of comic blunders and mishaps. She must also compete with a favored colleague who leads a much livelier group, in a better bus, with rooms in a fancier hotel, and simply entertains his charges without attempting anything boring like information. Her crowd suffers broken air conditioning, stays in unsanitary fleabags, and complains about her lecturing, all the while envying the other guide's clients.

As Georgia and her bunch of misfits stumble through the horrors of their trip, they all begin to change and grow, binding together over some shared misfortunes, learning some tolerance for each other, and in effect trading certain qualities. Some of the film's comedy results from Georgia's clients eventually educating her, for example, and her own surrender to the passion of Greece. She falls in love with the bus driver, a Eurostud named Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis), while her group comes to appreciate her lessons, and Mr. Funny turns out to be a Wise Old Man, full of advice that inspires all the awakenings and transformations.

The romance, the humor, the easy sentimentality combine to insure that "My Life in Ruins" should draw a great many people to the theaters; the movie serves as something like an antidote to the thundering blockbusters, a chick flick that should please a wide audience. If the sentiment follows the path of contrivance and predictability, the tour bus traverses a brilliantly sunny landscape and the locations provide something like a palpable sense of history. For many, the movie, which often deliberately devolves into a series of beautifully animated postcards, may either substitute for a trip to Greece or, more likely, inspire an actual visit to our collective past.