The Really Big Chill

By RICHARD CORLISS

LONGTIME COMPANION Directed by Norman Rene; Screenplay by Craig Lucas

This is an AIDS drama that . . . Wait, don't go away! We know you gave at the office. We figure you feel sympathy for Ryan White -- and pity, at least, for others with the disease, even if they are homosexuals or intravenous drug users. And we realize that, with all the goodwill in the world, you are in no rush to see sick people suffer. You get enough of that each night on the network news.

Still, you should listen up about Longtime Companion. For it is a splendidly bitchy comedy, The Women crossed with The Big Chill. Also a soap opera, a horror movie and a how-to manual on coping with catastrophe. On a small budget, writer Craig Lucas and director Norman Rene (who teamed just as productively on the Broadway comedy Prelude to a Kiss) have created a beguiling panorama. It spans the '80s, a decade that, for gay men and those who love them, took a fatal tailspin from high camp to tragedy. The film is a juggling act -- of characters, attitudes and moods -- that never loses it balance.

Longtime Companion begins as a memoir of those heady days -- they may literally be called gay -- when everyone was strong and supple, when partying was a kind of performance art, when promiscuous sex was both a political declaration and a fashion statement. It is the summer of '81. Sean (Mark Lamos) and David (Bruce Davison), a middle-aged couple, watch a hunky guy stroll past them on a Fire Island beach, and their toes curl with wry pleasure. But a New York Times story about a newly discovered condition afflicting homosexual men has the gentle revelers wondering: Is the CIA trying to scare them out of having sex? Best to turn their trademark withering irony into irony about withering. "We got gay restaurants now, and gay doctors," notes Fuzzy (Stephen Caffrey). "And gay cancer."

As the disease begins to run rampant through the community, gay men begin to realize that it will not provide a glamorous, Dark Victory-style degeneration. Any illness can be ugly, and so can the response to it. Amid a sickroom's strained bonhomie, Willy (Campbell Scott) tiptoes away to wash off the light kiss of an infected friend. But others find the option of heroic devotion. David, now nursemaid to the ailing Sean, covers up when Sean's boss calls, and diapers the incontinent patient. Because David is also standing a potential deathwatch on his future, his caring grace is spectacular. This is what love is.

"What do you think happens when we die?" "We get to have sex again." Lucas and Rene know AIDS is not God's punishment for having sex, and their film is not afraid to show gay men being randily affectionate toward one another. But Longtime Companion represents no special pleading for gays; it is about any group of people who might get blindsided by a plague. Thanks to a terrific ensemble cast (including, in addition to the above, Dermot Mulroney, Mary-Louise Parker and Patrick Cassidy), these people are quirky, compassionate, plenty human. You are encouraged to laugh along with this wonderfully funny and, of course, heartbreaking picture. It's O.K. to laugh, and, at the end, it's O.K. to cry.