The Prince of Prepuberty Grows Up BIG TOP PEE-WEE

By RICHARD CORLISS

Children are born anarchists. Babies reign in the solitary kingdom of ego, unable to distinguish the "I wanna" of whim from the "I gotta" of need. In an age of instant gratification and infant attention span, the popular arts have played to this childish impulse. Heavy-metal rock beats out its primal demands like a child pulling a high-chair tantrum. TV is the baby-sitter of a spoiled kid's dreams: it promises everything, never says no and lets you change the channel if you don't get what you want. And many movies these days are less adolescent than infantile, spinning fables in which youth is its own reward. The summer hit Big teaches that a 13-year-old boy can find love with the proper career woman and succeed in business without really trying. Who'd ever care to be a grownup when childhood is portrayed as so pure, so powerful, so enlightenedly selfish?

In this kid kingdom, Pee-wee Herman is the prince of prepuberty. For almost a decade, Actor-Writer Paul Reubens, 35, has presented himself as Pee-wee, a gawky, geeky child. The spectacle is both corny and hip, retrograde and avant- garde. It turns Pinky Lee, the '50s kids' show host, into a subject for performance art. At first Pee-wee was a coterie favorite of adults, but with his 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure and his Saturday-morning TV show, Reubens has gained a huge peanut gallery. Even for those who found the Pee-wee persona grating, there was ingenuity in the movie's pop-art surrealism and the show's pop-up-book snazz of design.

Big Top Pee-wee is more of the smart same. Young MacPee-wee has a farm that is a sort of summer camp -- high camp -- for animals. In the barn, the sheep and cow sleep in beds. For breakfast the horse flaps pancakes, and Pee-wee's talking-pig pal devours them. At the hint of a hurricane, Pee-wee leads his brood into the storm cellar ("Women and chickens first!") and dresses them in party hats. Because there are no other humans on the farm and few children nearby, Pee-wee is his own role model, his only playmate, and the film is an isolated boy's fantasy of comradeship. It's pretty funny too.

The big news here, and potentially the big problem, is that Big Top simultaneously defines Pee-wee as a child and an adult. He has a fiancee, the sweet, prissy Winnie (Penelope Ann Miller). And when a traveling circus parks on his farm, he falls in lust with an aerialist named Gina (Valeria Golino). Pee-wee's first sexy screen kiss, with the voracious-mouthed Gina, will surely raise temperatures -- though, as Winnie notes sadly, it was inevitable. "You're a man. She's Italian." But what are we to make of Pee-wee's deflowering, symbolized by shots of fireworks, trains zooming into tunnels, spuming lava and mud wrestling? Is this evidence of puppy-dog passion, or an act of child abuse? Will Pee-wee's old fans be disappointed, and his young fans grossed out? It would be a fine irony if Reubens, who became a star playing to the American cult of childishness, were to get burnt because he wanted to play a little grown up.