Darkness in Suburbia

By JAY COCKS

What do you do when you find your daughter huddled in the back of her bedroom closet, taking a troublesome trip on LSD? Or shacked up in the East Village with a Hell's Angels cokehead? Well, if you believe Eli Wallach and Julie Harris in The People Next Door, you blame older brother. You get mad at little sister. You get mad at the neighbors and at each other. And all the time you yell, yell, yell. In every way, The People Next Door is an anachronism, a "naturalistic" play like those prevalent in the 1950s. It ran on TV two years ago and has now been transported to the screen with every cliche, every oversimplification, every gross dramatic blunder intact.

The subject, to be sure, is a serious one. But JP Miller, who wrote the similarly devious Days of Wine and Roses, is really not interested in it. What occupies his time is repeated and virulent attacks on youth, who are portrayed throughout as spoiled, selfish, loveless and unloving brats. There are a couple of cursory attempts to explain young people's interest in drugs (Mommy takes lots of pills, Daddy is a booze hound), but they all smack of smug rationalization. In the midst of all these dismal goings on are several fine actors yelling to get out. Wallach is brutal and forceful as the father; Hal Holbrook, playing a next-door neighbor, is remarkably moving against overwhelming odds; and the young actors--Deborah Winters, Stephen McHattie, Don Scardino--are a talented crew. The best of The People Next Door is the brilliant, low-key camera work of Gordon Willis, whose fine eye for color and composition enlivened other moribund exercises, like End of the Road and The Landlord. Perhaps Willis, instead of investing such care in this project, might better have shut off all the lights on the set and left The People Next Door, with its author, in total darkness.

. Jay Cocks

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