Beleaguered Sanity Toughs It Out

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE SURVIVORS Directed by Michael Ritchie Screenplay by Michael Leeson

"I love the smell of Malamute in the morning!" With this glad cry, Donald Quinelle (Robin Williams) mushes his dog sled through the snows of New England, eager for his climactic battle with an enemy who, like Donald, has surrendered to the fantasy that violent action, backed by deadly skills in the martial arts, is a necessity for survival in America today. Too bad he has to call time out in their gunfight because he brought the wrong bullets with him.

How Donald came to be the most eager recruit in the training camp of a right-wing private army commanded by a fried-chicken franchisee from Detroit is the substance of Michael Ritchie's bleakly acute comedy. The Survivors is the summer's only true satire, a mostly successful attempt to puncture a ballooning national lunacy with pinpricks of beleaguered rationalism. The film may face a survival fight of its own; it contains nothing that an adolescent can get behind.

Donald has his excuses for veering off into extremism. Getting fired is never easy to take. But when the boss has trained a parrot to squawk out the bad news, the experience is likely to be more than usually unnerving. And that is only the beginning. Treated rudely at the unemployment office, Donald cannot even have a bracing cup of coffee and a peaceful cry in the luncheonette across the street. For it is just then that a masked and seemingly psychopathic gunman (Jerry Reed) decides to hold up the place. With a little help from Sonny Paluso (Walter Matthau), who is also abashed to be out of work, Donald manages to foil the crime. Neither brave nor bright, he just cannot help extending the general messiness of his life to everyone he meets, even criminals.

Naturally, he does not see it that way. Turned into a media hero for a day, Donald sees himself as the sort of bold citizen-adventurer these troubled times require. All he needs is some weaponry and a little training, and, as his new friend Sonny keeps trying to tell him, his head examined. This is particularly true since their lunch-counter assailant is bent on eliminating them as potential witnesses to his failed crime. He is, as it were, the dark side of the force that holds Donald in its grip, a small-time hood whose fantasy is that he is a big-time Mafia hit man.

The film sometimes wobbles in tone, and there is a certain strain involved in turning Donald and his criminal opponent into allies against rightist paramilitarists. But like all of Ritchie's best work (Downhill Racer, Semi-Tough), the film is full of shrewd throwaway behavioral observations. Sonny, for example, has a daughter (Kristen Vigard) who is a little compendium of spacy teen-age confusions; one minute she is watching porn tapes, the next she is trying to catch falling snowflakes on her tongue. Michael Leeson, who wrote scripts for the TV series Taxi, uses that show's mixture of urban gallantry and paranoia in his first feature. He has given Williams his best chance to vent his singular, hysterical style in a movie and provided Matthau, stooped and shuffling under the burden of his sanity, with his richest part in years. The film's moral is spoken by Donald's fiancee. Eyeing the arsenal that Donald thinks he needs to walk tall, she protests, "I don't believe in surviving. I believe in living." People who agree with her should see The Survivors in order to contemplate the alternative, hilariously well stated.

--By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.