A Mortality Play

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BOBBY DEERFIELD Directed by Sydney Pollack Screenplay by Alvin Sargent Romance is a function of frustration.

However interesting their troubles along the way, the legendary Tristan and Isolde would exert but small claim on anyone's imagination if, in the end, they were permitted to settle down in a split level to raise 2.4 children and give each other head colds. Death is, of course, the thing that finally and definitively separates lovers in our culture's greatest romances.

But as a rule it is implicitly understood to be the agent of other, almost equally potent divisive forces--class distinctions, for example, or unyielding morality--and the fact that such considerations have the power to keep postmodern lovers apart for no more than about 30 seconds presents the contemporary novelist or film maker with a rather serious problem in plot construction.

What barriers can he possibly create to frustrate his lovers in order to 1) create contrast for their few moments of middle-passage bliss and 2) strike an ominous chord in order to prepare us for the large final frustration?

Bobby Deerfield, which might have been subtitled "A Mortality Play," offers an intelligent and quite moving solution to this problem by using the title character's obsessive preoccupation with the possibility of his own demise (and his attempts to deny that preoccupation through a studied lack of affect) as a means of dulling the romantic impulse. Deerfield is a star racing driver whose success is based on a superrationality that requires a cutting off of all emotion. But then a car that is the twin of Deerfield's spins out of control, its driver is horribly hurt in the crash, and reason dictates that Bobby discover what happened in order to avoid a similar fate.

Investigation takes him to a Swiss sanitarium where the other driver is recuperating, and there he meets an eccentrically charming woman who is dealing not just with the possibility of imminent death but with its certainty.

Her willful fancifulness intrigues and annoys, but in his self-absorption and disconnectedness, he misses the clues to her condition, therefore her motives.

When he finally learns that she's dying, he has no choice, if he wants to share her last weeks with her, but to open himself to her. In so doing he also establishes emotional connection with a past from which he has deliberately cut himself off, with life in general. Her death then becomes a kind of victory, moving one not to tears but to a sense of affirmation.

But one does not want to make Bobby Deerfield sound like heavy going. Director Pollack has almost flawlessly understated its case. The Europe through which his couple move is one of soft colors, handsome but not overawing. And in Al Pacino he has one of the few actors who can play narcissism without seeming to be a lummox, while Marthe Keller finds a steely spine in her characterization of what might have been your standard movie kook. She is vulnerable without being pathetic, compelling without being neurotic.

What is especially good about this picture is that awareness of its main theme --the chancy, mysterious, unfair workings of mortality--is present, as it should be in the calculations of any healthy individual, but it appears as neither obsession nor nasty surprise. As Deerfield comes to realize, it is just part of life, something we must learn to accept, as some of us must learn to accept such happier but equally haphazard gifts--a brief romance, a sweet spring day. The comparison here must be to Love Story, in which mortality was dragged onstage--like Lord Olivier making a cameo appearance--to lend spurious dignity to an otherwise tacky enterprise.

Here by contrast it is a self-effacing costar, a presence to be reckoned with right from the start, but not an overweening one. That makes this lovely, lively film an adult entertainment in the best sense of the word. -- Richard Schickel

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