War Dreams HOPE AND GLORY

By RICHARD CORLISS

Who can trust memories? And why should a memory film -- this one, say -- be any more reliable than a dream newsreel? Flipping through the family album of his imagination, an indulgent author wants to forgive and embrace everyone. So he airbrushes the warts and sets any bedroom closet skeletons to dancing merrily. After all, the kids will be watching. He may also find that his fondness for vignettes ("Remember when Aunt Bea got squiffed and vamped the delivery boy?") undercuts the dramatic imperative to hold the anonymous viewer's attention. Private lives don't always play in public. Grandpa's % ripping yarn is a stranger's restless yawn.

John Boorman's family -- here called the Rohans -- waged and, from a semidetached house in suburban London, waited out the war against Hitler. Dad (David Hayman) joined the army. Mum (Sarah Miles) stayed home with the three children. The teenage daughter (Sammi Davis) discovered the romance of sex under fire. Her preschool sister (Geraldine Muir) held on to any available hand. And Bill (Sebastian Rice Edwards), Boorman's seven-year-old surrogate, was thrilled to pieces by the explosive newness of it all. A bombed-out house with all its booty! A Luftwaffe pilot parachuting into the neighborhood! If these adventures can land on his doorstep, what exploits await him in the wide world outside?

The real boy soon found out. A director-daredevil in the grand British line of Michael Powell and David Lean, Boorman thinks there is still an empire, of traditions if not of global power, worth challenging and defending. Let smaller-souled men paint still lifes of kitchen sinks; Boorman is a muralist, with epic ambitions and a lust for impossible risks. He has spent his movie career navigating wild rivers (Deliverance) or cutting his way through jungles (The Emerald Forest), plunging into the mythic past (Excalibur) or the hallucinatory present (Exorcist II: The Heretic). Each film is an exploration of the dark places where civilized man butts up against his own primitive soul.

And back home, he says, is more of the same -- the beginning of the same. Everyone in Hope and Glory may be English middle class, but Boorman sees to it that war soon turns the instincts feral. In the rubble of a blitzkrieg, children forage for ghastly souvenirs, and adults renounce a lifetime of propriety for some guilty, convulsive sex. But this is not a horror story, though there are horrors for the Rohans to endure. And though their ordeal was unusual, Boorman makes it close to universal. Every family lives in a war zone of its own circumstances and compromises; most families find the strength to soldier on. Boorman is even gracious enough to cap his film with an idyllic reunion of clan Rohan. Mum and her sisters giggle conspiratorially; young Bill, now a gentleman of precious leisure, goes boating on the river. These are images every moviegoer can share as he closes Boorman's lovely memory book.