Low Budget

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

HOW TO BEAT THE

HIGH COST OF LIVING

Directed by Robert Scheerer

Screenplay by Robert Kaufman

It may not be the best line in the picture, but it is certainly the bottom line. Jessica Lange delivers it. She plays one of three housewives so oppressed by the effect of inflation on their lives and expectations that they resort to grand larceny to solve their problems. As usual, Jessica is fighting with her husband (Richard Benjamin) about money. Why, he wonders, is she putting so much pressure on him? Simple, she responds: she is just like all the other women of her class and kind, brought up "to marry the best possible good provider they could stomach."

Ouch! As with a lot of other things in this curious little movie, which has the bland air of a sitcom but is blacker in spirit than it pretends to be, there is bitter, discomfiting truth in that moment. Writer Kaufman's guiding spirit is not misogynistic; he lays about him with a fine, impartial hand. For example, Jane Curtin, who could turn out to be Saturday Night Live's most valuable contribution to the movies, plays a woman reduced to instant penury when her husband abandons her and raids all their bank accounts before informing her of his desertion--by leaving a message on her answering machine. Then there is Susan Saint James, trying to raise the children on a too-small alimony check. She wants to marry an agreeable fellow who is also broke. Too discreet to sleep together in her bedroom, where the children might discover them, and too poor to hire a motel room, they must cohabit in her station wagon, parked in the garage.

So it goes in a desperate suburban world, where the filling station operator is only too happy to pick up an over used credit card and turn it in for the reward, where an IRS audit can strain a marriage to the breaking point, where a grandfather must move in with his daughter because grandma has decided that she is a lesbian. The riposte to this rich variety of nonsense is for Lange, Curtin and Saint James to stage a heist. They decide to make off with the day's receipts of a shopping center, which are being displayed in a huge plastic ball as a promotional stunt. There are reasonable suspense and good comic effect as the three nice women stumblingly rehearse, plan and execute the robbery. The strategy is to attack while witnesses are distracted by a goofy historical pageant about Oregon, where -- refreshingly -- the film was shot. The high point of that history, the socko ending toward which the pageant builds, is -- could it be otherwise? -- a Rose Bowl victory by the local football team.

The plot, though serviceable, is not really the point. It is just an excuse for some hard but sympathetic observations of the way many people live now. Director Scheerer may not fully realize that; there is something unemphatic in his handling of material that needs to be sharper. The acting is good. Lange is hard and dizzy, Saint James mousy and distracted, Curtin self-pitying yet capable. When called upon to improvise a striptease in order to cover her pals' getaway, she is both game and sexy. Her developing relationship with a shy policeman, expertly played by Dabney Coleman, adds a pleasant grace note to an edgy, insinuating comedy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.