Fire and Ice

By JAY COCKS

THE HOMECOMING

Directed by PETER HALL Screenplay by HAROLD PINTER

This is a precise adaptation of Pinter's play--the director and much of the cast are intact from the original 1965 London production--and it makes a fine, ferocious film. One reason for its success is that no one writes this well originally for films, not even Harold Pinter. His other screenplays are cool, exemplary, probably the best scenario writing now being done in English, as a recently published collection (Grove; $10) readily attests. The screenplays are all adaptations, though. They have the eerie accents of Pinter, share a great many of his obsessional themes, but the plots and the people are not really his.

Here the writing is Pinter first and thoroughly, and the film--part of the American Film Theater subscription series--does him almost flawless service.

If the Continental style of crediting films were adopted, this would be less a film by Peter Hall than by Harold Pinter.

This is not meant to diminish Hall's excellent rendering of the play, however.

The Homecoming's plot is familiar by now: a college professor in America (Michael Jayston) brings his wife (Vivien Merchant) back to London to meet his family: a malevolent patriarch (Paul Rogers), a fey uncle (Cyril Cusack) and the patriarch's two unmarried sons--an aspiring boxer (Terence Rigby) and a seedily elegant hoodlum type (Ian Holm). The professor separates himself from his family and stands aside as his wife is drawn into it. It would seem that the men humiliate her, but she thrives on their abusive attentions. Indeed, by taunting and captivating each of them sexually, she seems eventually to level them all.

"I can sum up none of my plays," Pinter has said. "I can describe none of them, except to say: that is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did." The essence of Pinter is in suggestion and allusion and tone. Of all contemporary writers, he has best calculated how to contain fire under ice.

His plays flourish in paradox. He appears to hold a distance between himself and his characters; yet the greater his disengagement, the more cutting the drama. The plays are about stripping away, about revelation; yet they give the feeling of tightness, of mounting frustration and desperation, like a large room in which all the exits systematically and for no apparent reason begin to disappear. They are funny, brutal declensions of pathology, each rooted in a private pain whose source remains a secret.

It takes a great deal of cool passion to play Pinter; the performances here are never less than excellent and sometimes--in the cases of Merchant, Holm and Rogers--more than that.

Each inflection, every pause and gesture, seems to have been measured by caliper, but this precision never be comes deadening. Instead it draws everything taut, gives an almost musical tension. The lighting, important to any movie, becomes crucial here, where the action is mostly confined to one room.

The superb cinematographer David Watkin has lit the family's old house in low, somber tones, giving it a tangible but evasive air of menace that perfectly matches the shadows and undertones of Pinter's language.

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