Spy Stasis

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE RUSSIA HOUSE

Directed by Fred Schepisi

Screenplay by Tom Stoppard

Guys in suits. Sitting around talking. Grant that their conversations are often agitated. Grant too that what they are discussing is not inherently uninteresting. Even so, this is not the most stirring territory for a movie to explore, and The Russia House spends entirely too much downtime in safe houses and situation rooms with an international team of spymasters and not enough quality time with their agent on the scene in Moscow and Leningrad.

He is boozy Barley Blair (Sean Connery), a fringe English publisher. With the help of a Soviet citizen named Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), he is supposed to spirit out of the U.S.S.R. a manuscript by a dissident scientist that supposedly has large strategic implications for the West -- or at least the portion of it that is loath to give up the cold war habit of mind. The two operatives naturally fall in love, and since old Barley's interest in geopolitics is minimal at best, his primary goal switches from smuggling documents to protecting his lady.

This is more than understandable, given Connery's inherent stalwartness and the entrancing shyness and sexiness Pfeiffer commingles in her performance. But given glasnost and whatever undertakings the producers made in order to be able to shoot on location in the Soviet Union, one never feels that Barley and Katya are deeply menaced by any counterespionage agency. Where are the spooks in leather trench coats? Where are the deep-shadowed alleys just waiting for a chase? Where is the hope for some kind of cinematically pleasing action to interrupt the endless rounds of talk that preoccupy this film?

One feels it went wrong long before Tom Stoppard sat down to write his doggedly faithful adaptation of John le Carre's best seller, long before director Fred Schepisi shouted "Action!" (or, possibly, in this case, "Stasis!"), perhaps even before the novelist set to work on his book. Le Carre seems to have gone off at about the moment the literary world made him its designated serious entertainer and he started believing his enthralled reviews. All his recent books contain far more writing than they require to explore their conventional characters and ideas. "Oh, get on with it," one snorts, setting his books aside half finished. "Oh, get on with it," one mutters sooner than that as this movie creeps -- uncreepily -- along. When the things you remember most fondly about a spy picture are its panoramic vistas of faraway places, everybody is in trouble. R.S.