Tattered Flag

By RICHARD CORLISS

FOUR FRIENDS Directed by Arthur Penn Written by Steven Tesich

Steve Tesich's love for America is an intoxicating passion. In his plays (Division Street) and screenplays (Breaking Away), this Yugoslav immigrant envisions an America that is a goad to greatness, an impossible ideal, a reconciler of a thousand contradictions, a Swiftian kick in the pants. Director Arthur Penn is fascinated with America too, but critically. He has upended myths of the Old West (The Left-Handed Gun, Little Big Man) and found desperate excitement on the fringes of 20th century Americana (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant). As collaborators, these two artists might produce high-arcing dramatic sparks, or maybe just rub each other the wrong way. In Four Friends, a picaresque panorama of life in the turbulent 1960s, they seem to have done a little of both. The film is ambitious, messy, moving, silly, impossible to accept on its own lofty terms, almost as difficult to dismiss.

"David, Tom and Danilo were the best of friends. And they all loved the same girl." David (Michael Huddleston) is a fat, funny Jew, welded by family tradition into his niche as a middle-class mortician. Tom (Jim Metzler) is tall, quiet, athletic, a reluctant ladykiller; he goes to Viet Nam and brings back a native wife and two children. Danilo (Craig Wasson) is Tesich's maturing self-image: breezing through high school and college, working in a slag mill, brushing up (almost fatally) against old American wealth, articulating his fellow Slavs' ardor for their adopted country. All three boys have Georgia (Jodi Thelen) on their minds--a willfully free-spirited girl, naive and narcissistic, who thinks herself the avatar of Isadora Duncan and lopes through the '60s in search of a style. Four Friends proceeds in the same manner. As one character forlornly notes: "The excess of all this is a little staggering."

Like More American Graffiti and Willie and Phil before it, Four Friends omits no fact or artifact from its survey of a decade. Pop songs, love beads, Jack-and-Jackie beachballs, deranged assassins--all are strip-mined for significance. The performers (excepting Reed Birney as a gentle, doomed aristocrat and Natalija Nogulich as Danilo's one stalwart love) display little charm, conviction or screen presence. But the intensity of Tesich's obsessions can ennoble his cliches about love of family, friends and country. And Penn, a poet of domestic sexual tension, stages illuminating vignettes to express what the script or actors cannot: a spasm of violence at Danilo's dinner table; the elegant tangle of lovers on a summer beach, with a third figure watching anxiously; a final campfire rendezvous full of elegy and accommodation. By this time the film has almost stitched itself back together, like the tattered American flag that Penn uses as bunting for his characters' shifting spirits. But the red of Perm's anger and the white of Tesich's soul may end up leaving most viewers blue. --By Richard Corliss

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