Teen Dreams

By Frank Rich

I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND

Directed by Robert Zemeckis Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale

If one had to pick a date when the 1960s began in earnest, it might well be Feb. 9, 1964. On that Sunday night, a goofy-looking rock group from working-class Liverpool burst into the American consciousness from the stage of TV's Ed Sullivan Show. For anyone who was young then -and many who were not -life palpably shifted gears. The Beatles quickly changed the face of popular culture: they soon helped transform fashions in everything from dress and manners to politics and sexuality. Certainly the upheavals of the '60s would have occurred without the Beatles, but the style of that chaotic era would not have been the same. The decade rocked, and at times exploded, to the Beatles' galvanizing beat.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand is an abundantly dizzy comedy set on that famous February weekend when "Beatlemania" invaded the U.S. Written and directed by two 26-year-old proteges of Director Steven Spielberg (the film's executive producer), it tells the story of a gaggle of suburban teen-agers who will stop at nothing to see the Beatles in person during their maiden visit to New York. As madcap farce the movie is wildly uneven: it starts slowly, and ultimately tots up as many dead spots as solid laughs. Yet the film succeeds at a far worthier mission. I Wanna Hold Your Hand re-creates precisely the excitement the Beatles let loose 14 years ago; it transports the audience back to the eye of a phenomenal social hurricane.

Most of the movie is set around the CBS television theater where the Beatles performed, and the Plaza Hotel, where they stayed. Sometimes it is all too obvious that the film was really shot in Hollywood, but there are many details that are just right. The rioting Beatles fans still wear the clothing and hair styles of the pre-mod years; Disc Jockey Murray the K and Ed Sullivan (in the eerie reincarnation of Impressionist Will Jordan) are on hand to play their pivotal roles in the drama. The Beatles themselves appear only as ghosts: on record jackets, in silhouette, in newsreel footage and, naturally, via their old song hits on the sound track. That is how it should be, for the movie's subject is not the lads from Liverpool but the millions of Americans whose lives they turned upside down.

The film's principal characters are a typical assortment of high school types. In their effort to meet the Beatles, the kids hijack cars and Plaza elevators; they defy parents, cops and gravity. The best scenes belong to the cast's two most talented actors, Nancy Allen (as the most demure of the girls) and Eddie Deezen (as a manic Ringo fetishist). In one delicious bit, Allen actually sneaks into the Beatles' suite, where she proceeds to have riotously raunchy encounters with her heroes' musical instruments and toilet articles.

For all the movie's slapstick escapades, it never turns into a Three Stooges picture. Director Robert Zemeckis' broad style frequently rises above silliness to be come a form of pop surrealism. The tip-off to his intentions occurs early on, when he shows us a mob of screaming girls grabbing up copies of Meet the Beatles in a store that stocks only Beatles albums. The scene is not faithful to reality but to our memories of that time. Such dreamlike exaggerations allow Zemeckis to cut to the very heart of his material.

The director and his co-scenarist Bob Gale also take pains to show the rebelliousness that the Beatles unleashed in their audience. Along the way we are casually reminded that the Beatles upended parent-child relationships, destroyed the Brylcreem market and supplanted the Kennedys as teen-age-culture heroes. One girl is so shaken by Beatlemania that she breaks up with her fiance; she suddenly senses that life has more possibilities than she had previously realized. A loud mouthed boy (Bobby DiCicco) tries to chop down the Sullivan show's transmitter because he knows that the Beatles mean the death of his macho '50s-greaser style. But history cannot be stopped, and the film ends with an ingenious restaging of the Beatles' TV debut. The scene is surprisingly affecting. Perhaps because things have so settled down since, it is very moving to relive that romantic Sunday night when the young seemed to inherit the earth.

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