Everybody into the Pool Cocoon

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ponce de Leon went looking for the Fountain of Youth and discovered Florida. For three elderly gents in a St. Petersburg retirement home, the situation is happily, treacherously reversed: without looking for it, they find the Swimming Pool of Youth in a mansion next door. The place has been rented out to a quartet of folks with the musk of mystery about them. They are, of course, from outer space -- Antarea, to be exact. They have come to retrieve a score of their comrades, stranded during an earlier expedition, who have reposed in giant sea pods off the Gulf Coast and are now being rejuvenated in the waters of that miracle swimming pool where the old guys take a furtive daily dip. And lo! these senior citizens are of a sudden healthy, frisky and horny. Cancers dissolve, romance blooms anew; fox-trotting arthritics turn into disco dervishes. Wouldn't it be wonderful if decay and death were so easily washed away?

And wouldn't it be nice if the science-fantasy genre, recently festooned with cotton-candy aliens and the air of suburban benevolence, could be refreshed by making contact with the laws of dramatic gravity? As it happens, Cocoon has many familiar elements: it could be called E.T. Meets the Over-the-Hill Gang, or On Golden Pod. Like last Christmas' Starman, it contains a love story ^ between an extraterrestrial (Tahnee Welch, Raquel's lithe and stunning daughter) and a young American (Steve Guttenberg); here sex is represented as a love-light that ricochets around the swimming pool. Like E.T. and a dozen other fantasy films, it boasts gorgeous, if insubstantial special effects from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio. And there is just enough locker-room humor to keep the gross-out brigade from snoring in their seats. But the film alchemizes these elements through its tone of gentle melancholy. For nesting inside Cocoon is a parable about life meeting death -- an affecting mortality play about old people touched or affected by America's youth culture.

The film's heroes are, after all, a half- century closer to death than its audience is. Art (Don Ameche), Ben (Wilford Brimley) and Joe (Hume Cronyn) are not mopes or sticks or hypochondriacs, but they know that their time has nearly elapsed, that their body clocks are running down, that pleasures of the flesh are now memories or might-have-beens. So their transformation into rakehells is both joyous and poignant. It is delicious to watch Ameche, 77, Cronyn, 73, and Brimley, 50 (but he can pass for old), kicking up dust as the stars of a geezer's Porky's. But for the characters' wives and girlfriends (Gwen Verdon, Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton), the spectacle is bittersweet. They realize that at any age, men must be boys, and women must be their sandbox playmates or their strict mothers. Some genders will just never grow up.

But some genres will. By the end, when these sunset adventurers take an outward-bound voyage toward a peaceful death, or into eternal life, this film has charted its serene course. One hopes that moviegoers will take Cocoon to their teenage hearts and make a box-office smash of the summer's sweetest, saddest, most exhilarating fable.