Slumming in The Lower Shallows IRONWEED

By RICHARD CORLISS

Poor Francis Phelan. Once he was something like "the Natural," an infielder for the Washington Senators, good glove man, top-of-the-lineup smile, tough as Ty Cobb sliding into second with his spikes flaring at the shortstop's groin. When baseball stardom eluded Francis, he tried being a husband to Annie -- best kisser in Albany -- and a father to Billy and Peg. That didn't work out either, so he hit the road and fell into the arms of Helen Archer, a singer who became a sod. There was some trouble with the law too: that scab he had killed, and a life on the run that has finally slowed to a stumble. Now Francis is an alcoholic hobo on the sad side of 50. He wanders the Albany streets on a Halloween night in 1938, cadging free meals and hoping to make his peace with the phantoms who beckon to him from every trolley seat, backyard and yawning grave. So many lives behind him, and so many deaths. A man just wants to rock himself to sleep and not wake up.

William Kennedy's novel Ironweed was 227 pages of the DTs, a funny boohoo ramble through Nighttown, an interior dialogue between Francis and his ghosts. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a healthy audience for the other novels (Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game) in Kennedy's Albany trilogy, with its wry poetic naturalism. The bums in Ironweed were not noble, but they had their own gravelly, poignant voices. The family Francis left behind was ordinary as linoleum, but their emptiness left a sympathetic ache in the reader's gut. Francis was drab and cramped on the outside, that husk of a booze-wracked body, but he didn't live there. He came to life inside, with way too many other people -- the loves, enemies and chances he had lost -- in the decaying mansion of his memories. What a lovely movie might dwell there!

Not this one. Not even with Hollywood's premier actor-stars, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, as Francis and Helen. And not even with Kennedy writing the screenplay. He must have known that the novel's sour, allusive poetry -- part James Joyce, part James T. Farrell -- would get lost in translation to the screen. He must have realized that Francis' life is significant not for what he does but for what he dreams and fears. But a movie like this, which concentrates on mundane plot, can only show, not reveal. As directed by Hector Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman), Ironweed lurks outside Francis' soul, like a tramp at a suburban window, permitting only dumb speculation on his fertile inner life. His ghosts are white-faced extras; his trek up Calvary becomes one long trudge toward oblivion. The movie provides a mug shot instead of an X ray.

Streep is always entertaining to watch, even when, as here, she looks like a debutante holidaying among the homeless. Both she and Helen are, after all, Vassar girls, and she bears herself with the shambling dignity of a gentlewoman trying to maintain moral equilibrium while on the skids. But Streep's role is small. Nicholson must carry the film, and it is no fair burden. In one or two other films, this sexy, daredevil performer has renounced his star quality, tamped his radiance, sat on his capacious charm, as if this were a higher form of acting. It is not. Pudgy and hollow-eyed, Nicholson gives the viewer no reason to follow Francis into the cemetery of all souls. But the actor is to be blamed only in believing that this role, robbed of its festering spiritual vitality, could ever come to instructive life. That life teems in the pages of Kennedy's novel -- an American Lower Depths. This Ironweed is the lower shallows.