Amid The Hubbub, Brando Magic

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FRESHMAN Directed and Written by Andrew Bergman

The resemblance, as everyone in The Freshman keeps remarking, is striking. In certain lights, especially dim ones, Carmine Sabatini looks uncannily like Don Vito Corleone, the Godfather of blessed movie memory.

Life imitating art? Not exactly. More like art imitating art, or artist imitating artist. For Marlon Brando is, of course, the man in the mafioso mask in both instances. It might perhaps be said the makeup man was kinder in aging him for the earlier role than the past 18 years have been in bringing him to his present hefty appearance. On the other hand, The Freshman is a comedy, and his roly-poly form and cherubic countenance defuse his menace and suit his self-satirizing purposes.

Those earnest souls who passed the early decades of this once dangerous, vulnerable actor's career awaiting his Hamlet are doubtless going to be dismayed that his first sustained screen appearance since becoming eligible for Social Security is not in something sort of Lear-ish. But The Freshman is no small thing. Well, actually, it is a small thing. But to a moviegoer deafened by and reeling from the rolling barrage laid down by the early summer's big box-office guns, the determined modesty, the unsprung affability of Andrew Bergman's comedy are precisely what make it treasurable.

The story's ostensible business is to maneuver invincibly innocent Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick), an N.Y.U. film student fresh from Vermont, into close proximity with the massively knowing Carmine. A street-dumb kid is just what Carmine needs for one of his nefarious schemes and might also be, as he sees it, just the thing for his spirited daughter (Penelope Ann Miller). But the film defies both convenient description and conventional logic, and in fact it gets into desperate expositional troubles toward the end. This is a movie one loves for its incidental pleasures, not its ultimate intentions, whatever they may be.

No film offering the spectacle of a Komodo dragon being transported across a state line for immoral purposes can be lightly dismissed. That's especially true when it also offers a delicious send-up of the contemporary passion for exotic culinary experiences and an equally wicked satire of the grander pretenses of cinema scholarship. The latter is an occupation that director Bergman, who has a Ph.D. in cultural history, narrowly escaped by turning to more self-consciously comic forms (he wrote The In-Laws and the play Social Security).

All this, and Bert Parks in a sombrero, warbling Tequila. Pretty rich. And though it's hard to say if old Bert knows he's being funny, the other actors do know, and joyously strut their best comic stuff. As Carmine's nephew, who arranges his meeting with Clark, Bruno Kirby redefines the combined bluster, sleaze and obsequiousness of the typical New York City fringe dweller. Maximilian Schell is in high, black humor as a madly galloping gourmet chef (you don't want to think too hard about his plans for that dragon). And Paul Benedict's pomposity, pretentiousness and venality as a film theorist are a little marvel of meanness.

Possibly Brando's presence challenged and inspired them. Or vice versa. Or something. For his comedy is delicately judged, and he invests Carmine with a lovely yearning quality -- for a son, even perhaps for the straight, square life he has never known. There is a scene in the midst of all this comic hubbub where he tries, and fails, to articulate the affection he has grown to feel for Clark that is pure behavioral reality, pure Brando magic. Reminding us of promises made and promises broken by him through the years, the actor transcends the context and puts us in touch with the muddled hopes and troubled history we have shared with him.