Dreams To Avoid

By RICHARD CORLISS

MISS FIRECRACKER

Directed by Thomas Schlamme

Screenplay by Beth Henley

Movies are show; plays are tell. Here's one difference. In Beth Henley's 1984 off-Broadway hit The Miss Firecracker Contest, a seamstress named Popeye Jackson explained that as a child she "used to make little outfits for the bullfrogs that lived out around our yard." In this expansive adaptation, Popeye (Alfre Woodard) displays one such frog, cunningly coutured in a nurse's gown with matching stethoscope. Ah, the glamorous realism of the cinema! It's cute too.

As screenwriter, Henley has dramatized elements only hinted at in her play, but the story is the same. Sweet, just slightly trampy Carnelle (Holly Hunter) determines to win the Miss Firecracker Contest as a way of standing up to the mocking townspeople and claiming some of the limelight that illuminates her chic, snooty cousin Elain (Mary Steenburgen). Two men, Carnelle's sometime lover Mac Sam (Scott Glenn) and Elain's wild brother Delmount (Tim Robbins), act as a geek chorus to the drama, but, typically in a Henley play, the real conflict is between young women clawing each other for respect, attention and love.

The movie's tone is high-pitched and precise. Everybody plays to the max, especially Steenburgen, sweet magnolia condescension dripping from every elongated syllable, and Hunter, crazy for acceptance, clinging to Delmount, desperately fanning the summer heat off Elain's body. They serve well this fable about the need to realize that some dreams are better off not coming true, at least in a town where the local tramp is the wisest soul around and the pouting princess is revealed as a frog who needs to put a stethoscope to her own porcelain heart. R.C.