Uneasy Riders and a Pig

By Richard Schickel Richard Corliss

LOST IN AMERICA

Foolish fellows! If they had just waited a few years, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper could have been really Easy Riders. Instead of discovering America from the jolting seats of their motorcycles, they could have cruised along in the stolid comfort of an RV. With, maybe, the little woman fixing toasted cheese sandwiches in the microwave.

Perhaps nothing so clearly shows how times have a-changed since 1969 than the choice of vehicles David Howard (Albert Brooks) makes when, having been passed over for promotion at the ad agency, he decides to seek true values on the open road. Somehow he talks his wife Linda (Julie Hagerty), a straight arrow with several bent feathers, into risking all their capital on this trundle into self-discovery. Their itinerary, compared with that of their role models, is truncated and painfully mainstream. It consists largely of Las Vegas, where she loses their nest egg in a night, and Hoover Dam, where they have a marital wrangle the scope of which matches the backdrop. But never mind this minimalism. Brooks (who directed Lost in America and co-wrote it with Monica Johnson) is a shrewd, deadpan observer of the secret life of middle-class Americans. He likes to bring their dreams of glorious escape to life, let them taste their new world, then watch them scurry back to the comfortable and familiar. His comedy would be cruel if Brooks were not so good at playing the victims he concocts: so pompously thrilled as he rationalizes their lurches off the beaten track, so bone scared when things go awry. In Hagerty and Garry Marshall, the TV mastermind who plays a casino boss, he has glorious foils. Lost in America does not conclude; it merely ends, as if Brooks had run out of money or inspiration before he could think up a third act. But the year is unlikely to produce a funnier unfinished symphony.

LUST IN THE DUST

Divine is a female impressionist, not a female impersonator. His art begins with a taste for drag and ends with a squeaky voice. Since all things human are alien to him, he lacks both the affection and the understanding that might make his sexual satire work. Something similar might be said of his new vehicle. Director Paul Bartel and Writer Philip John Taylor neither know nor care enough about horse operas to spoof them well, although a few veterans of the form (Tab Hunter among them) know enough to keep their faces straight. The plot has to do with recovering a cache of lost gold, one-half of the map to which is tattooed to Divine's backside, one-half to Lainie Kazan's. The year's most resistible shot is the one that juxtaposes both parts of the chart. --R.S.

A PRIVATE FUNCTION

Gilbert Chilvers (Michael Palin), a Yorkshire foot doctor, is a man of modest means and ambitions. Not so his wife Joyce (Maggie Smith), who rankles at the snootiness of the town's upper class, especially since she is not part of it. Here it is 1947, and what with food rationing and the gentry hoarding giblets in their attache cases, Joyce can't get a decent piece of meat. Not, at least, until Betty comes to visit. A plump sow with a sweet disposition, Betty is the Chilverses' ticket to burgherhood--if only Gilbert can bring himself to slit the throat of his new companion. "It's not just pork. It's power," Joyce tells her sweet, weak husband. "Kill your friend!" Can he resist Joyce's way with the whip--especially when she is so erotically commanding in victory? "Well, Gilbert," purrs this domestic dominatrix, "I think sexual intercourse is in order."

Screenwriter Alan Bennett has described A Private Function as "the fulfillment of his long-held desire to write about a chiropodist and (Director Malcolm) Mowbray's wish to direct a film about a pig." In fact, they have larger issues to lance. Although the film is set during Clement Attlee's Labor reign, it applies just as ferociously to Margaret Thatcher's pinchpenny Britain. With its double-edged title and its tone of bitter whimsy, A Private Function asks to be taken as a hymn to the meanness of the human spirit, in ) which the one decent soul is "a pathetic cringing nancy" to his wife and a "festering, bunion-scraping little pillock" to the local GP. The cheery camaraderie of Britain's postwar Ealing comedies has given way to pig-eat-pig biliousness--which would be fine if Bennett (An Englishman Abroad) and Mowbray did not engage in something like laugh rationing. This is an Animal Farm that could have used a taste of Animal Crackers. --By Richard Corliss

THE SURE THING

Baby yuppies go on the road: the week's oddest cross-pollination of genres. In this teenpic travelogue, Gib (John Cusack) and Alison (Daphne Zuniga) are only college freshmen, and already they're lost in America. Gib, a quick, pleasant non-hunk, attends an Eastern school, but someone has lined up a "sure thing" for him in California. It is the film's unlikely premise that this bundle of lissome lubriciousness (Nicollette Sheridan), whom Gib has never met, is his for the asking; he need only go west to strike gold. He will do so in the reluctant company of Alison, a haughty classmate so indifferent to Gib's ragged charm that they will inevitably prove a match made in movie heaven.

As a late addition in the acne rash of teen stories, The Sure Thing's script (by Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts) must qualify as pretty "intellectual and stuff." Alison might fret about maintaining her grade- point average, and Gib may actually fall for her because "she happens to be an excellent judge of quality shirtwear." Welcome to the decade of lowered expectations, which Rob Reiner's meandering direction fully satisfies. The Sure Thing aims not to blaze trails but to avoid the gross failings of its predecessors. All right, then. In teenpix a shrug is better than a shudder. --R.C.