Coming Unglued the Money Pit

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

When Walter and Anna (Tom Hanks and Shelley Long) find their dream house (actually, it is a mansion, long on charm and short on viable plumbing), they neglect to check the neighborhood. And nobody tells them their property is located deep in Harold Lloyd country, where anything that can go wrong will and all the repairmen are incompetent or venal.

Their problems start with some little do-it-yourself fix-ups: on a rotted stair riser and a front-door lock that sticks. Working on them, Walter somehow causes both the stairway and the entranceway to collapse. That says nothing about what happens to the chimney when he carelessly tosses a log into the second-floor fireplace. What termites and neglect have put asunder eventually requires a crew of 100 to set to rights. And what happens to all of them when Anna innocently plugs a kitchen appliance into the workers' heavy- equipment circuit one sunny morning both defies description and bears comparison to one of Lloyd's immortally orchestrated and madly logical disaster sequences.

Director Benjamin's gift for this kind of comic invention (first hinted at in My Favorite Year) is now finely honed. Long is the adorable mistress of frazzled common sense. Hanks poises between panic and exasperation with the kind of weird aplomb Cary Grant used to manage, and Alexander Godunov, the dancer, proves himself a gifted comic actor as an egomaniacal symphony conductor. They are all comparatively new to film, and that makes their display of old, all but lost movie skills even more cheering. The medium may have a future after all. R.S.