Nostalgia at 30

By RICHARD CORLISS

RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN Directed and Written by John Sayles

These are strong, homely, New England faces, sculpted by generations of farmers and teachers, Italian laborers and Irish domestics. They share a collective biography, and a geography that rolls over the Green Mountains and into Harvard Square. Their bodies are solid, their minds restless. They are the children, not only of Kennedy and Galbraith, but of William Sloane Coffin and Abbie Hoffman --of the activist '60s, when getting busted at a teach-in was a required course. Those were the great days, when seven of them piled into a friend's car heading south for an antiwar demonstration and got detained by some suspicious police in Secaucus, N.J. They never got to Washington, but they had a lot of fun calling themselves the "Secaucus Seven." Now, ten years later, they commune again for a weekend of charades and basketball and nostalgia, some skinny-dipping, lovemaking and soul searching. They're turning 30, jogging toward the compromises of early middle age --Updikescent-- and out of the corner of their minds they wonder how much fun that will be.

Welcome to John Sayles' going-away party for the the idealism of the Nixon years. Not much "happens" in Secaucus. Some songs are sung, a few partners change, and the whole gang is falsely arrested for mur dering a deer -- or, as one of them describes the charge, "Bambicide." Sayles has appropriated the discursive, episodic format of many recent films (and the spirit of that charming, intelligent Swiss com edy Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), but he constructs individual scenes with the deftness of a Billy Wilder. His dialogue often circles back on, and en riches, itself. He creates more than a dozen complex, contradictory characters through their speech rhythms, the way they walk and sit and prepare food, and the diminishing space between the heads of two people trying to decide whether to spend the night with each other. The characters are like the film: funny, rue ful, modest, utterly engaging -- alive.

Sayles is himself not yet 30. At 25 he won the O. Henry Award for his short sto ry 1-80 Nebraska M.490-M.205. Three years later his novel Union Dues (whose theme of cultural cross-pollination surfaces again in Secaucus) was nominated for a National Book Award. National Book Award. He has written three films for Roger Gorman's bargain-basement New World Pictures: Piranha, The Lady in Red and the current Battle Beyond the Stars. The profits from his stories and his Corman scripts

helped cover the budget for Secaucus: a preposterously low $60,000. He wrote, produced, directed and edited the film and plays -- with wit and an edge of anger -- a featured role. Sayles has a remarkable talent. Just as important, he has shown the ambition and initiative to bring some thing fresh to a movie industry on the ropes.

A good colorful film resume is maker; a no $60,000 guarantor of budget a doesn't automatically confer nobility on a movie project; too many expert novelists have lost their way on Hollywood Boulevard. But Sayles has proved that his gift as a "legit" writer -- that sharp, compassion ate eye for behavioral detail and human comedy -- can transfer to the screen with out condescension or loss of nuance. "Film is a delicate medium," says one of Sayles' short-story characters (ironically, of course). Now Sayles has the chance to bring his imagination to the medium and make it rare. It is a joy to watch that skill reveal itself in Return of the Secaucus Seven; it is even more exciting to anticipate the Sayles to come.

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