Raking Up the Autumn Leavings

By RICHARD CORLISS, RICHARD SCHICKEL, R.C., R.S.

Seven films for fall, from Bond to Beyond

STREAMERS

David Rabe's war play Streamers takes place in a kind of boot camp on the border of national psychosis. Here boredom sinks into despair; high spirits become hysterics; the killer instinct can flare with switchblade speed. Set in 1965, Streamers was written soon after the 1975 fall of Sai gon, and Rabe's dialogue glows with the white heat of hindsight. His four young draftees are doomed from the start, either by their blithe ignorance of the horror to come or by their premonition of it.

Though they never leave their Virginia Army base, they are treading blindly through a field of moral land mines.

Seven years later, through Director Robert Altman's camera eye, we can see that Streamers is only incidentally about Viet Nam. Men do not need a war to touch their heart of darkness, Rabe seems to suggest; the threat of human intimacy is provocation enough. Are they men like Billy (Matthew Modine), a fresh-faced lad with a college education? Or Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein), an upper-class homosexual with a taste for taunt? Or Roger (David Alan Grier), a sweet-natured black who deflects each insult with a shrug? Or Carlyle (Michael Wright), the slum-bred black spoiling for a quick apocalypse? Doesn't matter. When the crisis comes, they will be as surprised as the paratrooper whose chute just wouldn't open.

Altman's principal actors won (and deserved) an ensemble award at last month's Venice Film Festival; but Wright's is the star presence here. He curls his lips around Carlyle's jive slurs until they are twisted into madhouse poetry. He glides through the barracks like a hipster on a death mission. Charlie Parker, meet Charlie Manson. Carlyle is the creepily irresistible spirit of all wars, hot and cold, global and interior, war without end, amen . -- By Richard Corliss

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN What's this? James Bond sipping parsley tea? Subjecting himself to herbal colonies? True, all too true, in Never Say Never Again. Since he is incarnated (actually, of course, reincarnated) by Sean Connery, now 53, the film's promising premise is that the free world's all-pro free safety has lost a step or two in his duel with the forces of evil, and requires a rehabilitating stay at a health spa before he can once again be licensed to kill in his formerly youthful and exuberant manner.

Not to worry though. He has scarcely settled into his uncomfortable regimen be fore he has bedded one of his therapists and received his first hints of the interna tional conspiracy that will preoccupy him for the rest of this loose-jointed remake of Thunderball. Once again, the scenario has something to do with the theft of nuclear warheads and their use as a blackmail weapon. The plot's mastermind is played with silky, neurotic charm by Klaus Maria Brandauer (so fine in Mephisto), while as his chief agent provocateur, Barbara Carrera deftly parodies all the fatal femmes who have slithered through Bond's career. And it is good to see Connery's grave stylishness in this role again. It makes Bond's cynicism and opportunism seem the product of genuine worldliness (and world weariness) as opposed to Roger Moore's mere twirpishness.

Still, Director Irvin Kershner allows the film to run on too long and too predictably. And, much too quickly, Screen writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. sets aside all considerations of the toll that age may have taken on its hero. It would have been funny (and perhaps even touching) to see him run out of breath in the midst of a chase. Or, when 007 hit the sack, have him reach for a good book instead of a bad blond.

--By Richard Schickel

HANNA K.

How do you survive? the Israeli lawyer is asked. "Like everyone else in this country: with passion. Passions." Hanna K. is a passionless film about passions -- the Israelis' passion to endure while surrounded by the barbed wire of Arab hostility, the Palestinians' passion to reclaim their homeland, the passion of one woman for justice and a fair measure of self-respect. Hanna Kaufman (Jill Clayburgh) is an American Jew who has come to Israel to practice law. Her first major client, a young Palestinian (Muhamad Bakri) caught sneaking into Israel, is attempting to secure legal right to the house he lived in as a boy. Prodded by her estranged husband (Jean Yanne) and provoked by the state prosecutor (Gabriel Byrne), by whom she has become pregnant, Hanna stands her ground, and nearly digs her own grave. By the end she is a spiritual sibling to Kafka's Joseph K.--a displaced person in a land where everyone tries to be reasonable and nothing makes sense.

Writer Franco Solinas (The Battle of Algiers) and Director Costa-Gavras (Z) know how to use movie archetypes to manipulate political loyalties. The Israeli prosecutor has the superior smile of a bureaucrat conquistador. The Palestinian is tall, thin, suntanned, nice to babies; and he has unflinching crystal blue eyes (would they lie to you?). And yet, the film bends over backward to seem fair to its swarm of social and personal ambiguities. The result is a well-meaning muddle that refuses to come alive. The pace is languid when it ought to fall into the march step of melodrama. Hanna K. does boast what may be a film first: an infant's circumcision, in closeup. It is not the only moment in the movie when the viewer is provoked to sit up and wince.

--R.C.

BRAINSTORM

Say this for Brainstorm: it offers no visible evidence of desperation. This is remarkable in that its star, Natalie Wood, died before shooting was completed. As a result, MGM/UA tried to abandon the film, over the protests of Director Douglas Trumbull and the insurers.

Say this against Brainstorm: it bears no sign of a highly mobilized imagination at work. Wood's death cannot be blamed. Her role as the estranged wife of a research scientist appears to have been intrinsically sketchy and secondary; she is present on the relatively few occasions when the film seems to require her. The problem lies with the scientist and his research.

He is played by Christopher Walken with a charmless introspectiveness that seems perversely calculated to put the audience off.

He and Colleague Louise Fletcher (who is unpersuasive as a threat to his marriage, incidentally) have developed a Rube Goldberg earmuff device that permits the transfer of thoughts and feelings from one brain to another.

The scientists believed they were working for the good of mankind, conveniently forgetting that their contract was with the military-industrial complex, which ultimately asserts its claims to the invention. The climactic scuffle is suspenseless; the movie's mind trips, when people are wired into the machine, are peculiarly disappointing since Trumbull has a justified reputation (2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as a brilliant special-effects man. Brainstorm is a jumble, not because it must compensate for a tragedy but because it cannot compensate for its own lack of clear purpose and forceful dramatic structure. --R.S.

BEYOND THE LIMIT

An alcoholic Englishman whose decency the tropic sun cannot bleach out (Michael Caine); a defrocked priest who yet retains his vocation (Joaquin de Almeida); a policeman whose cynicism is not immune to humane sympathies (Bob Hoskins); an innocent who discovers that life is not as simple to judge as its ideological surfaces seem to promise (Richard Gere). Here is Graham Greene's basic cast, grown rather too familiar before he lined them all up again for his 1973 novel The Honorary Consul. Christopher Hampton's adaptation stresses the book's flaws while diminishing the atmospherics and the behavioral quirkiness that gave it fitful life. The principals all seem uncomfort ably miscast, and the direction by John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday) is classy-dull. Good intentions a good siesta make. -- R.S.

LONELY HEARTS

A middle-aged piano tuner is freed of his lifelong devotion to his mother when she dies; a sexually timid woman leaves her overprotective parents and sets up a small life of her own; a dating service introduces them, and their halting romance is constantly put off course by a variety of modest mishaps. This Australian film is rescued from total self-effacement by the vulnerability and believability of Norman Kaye and Wendy Hughes in the central roles. Director Paul Cox knows that in life, as opposed to the movies, the first pen you grab is always dry, significant emotional activities are often interrupted by whimpering dogs, important dialogue is often delivered by someone chomping on an empty Styrofoam cup. These asides drain the sentimentality out of the movie, granting it a surprising singularity. --R.S.

KOYAANISQATSI

Welcome to History of the World, Part II. When you begin your 87-min. movie with the volcanic birth pangs of creation and end it with a space capsule that falls to earth like the last dying star, no one is likely to accuse you of undue modesty. Novice Director Godfrey Reggio pours thousands of images over the moviegoer: helicopter shots of rolling hills and fields, slow-motion filming of buildings being demolished, streams of cars and pedestrians in a big hurry to get nowhere. There is no narration, only the intoxicating drone of Composer Philip Glass's score. The film's title (rhymes with coy honest Nazi) is a Hopi word meaning "life out of balance"; but the Manichaean juxtaposition of nature (good) and civilization (bad) need not be taken too seriously. Enjoy the picture instead as the ravishing prototype for an avant-garde MTV.

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