Spoiled Brainchild

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

HOOK Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screenplay by Jim V. Hart and Malia Scotch Marmo

A Peter Pan who works days as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer? Whose cellular phone is practically grafted to his ear? Who is -- pause here for J.M. Barrie to shift in his grave -- afraid of flying?

Welcome to '90s revisionism run riot. And, assuming such a well-loved tale actually needs to be made more relevant for today's audience, a not unpromising conceit. Robin Williams is a Peter Unprincipled, grounded in all the latest guilts and anxieties. He has a new surname (Banning) and a wife and two kids he neglects, owing to the press of the greed business. He is also afflicted by a convenient case of amnesia. He knows he's an orphan, but he can't remember anything that happened before "Gran Wendy" (Maggie Smith) arranged for his adoption by an American couple. Namely, he can't remember that he passed his preadolescent years wearing a little green tunic and a silly hat.

Unfortunately, it requires a great whirring and clanking of plot machinery to make us believe this Peter is the One True Peter. The sounds of still more noisy manufacturing accompany the creation of a father-offspring conflict and the maneuvering of the Banning clan back to Gran's house. There, the children are bedded down near a familiar open window, through which they can be conveniently abducted by Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). In due course Banning will be conducted through the same window by his old friend Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts). His mission is to rescue his kids, but that gives him the chance to prove he's really a caring male (a Bly, if not entirely blithe, spirit) and to rediscover his true, spritely identity.

Whew. No wonder the guy has trouble getting off the ground. He's carrying too much baggage. And so is Steven Spielberg's movie, which starts out deceptively, that is, wonderfully, with a school production of the original Peter Pan -- cardboard scenery and sweetly earnest little players, faces scrunched by the effort of remembering their lines. This is the director at his formidable best, tenderly evoking the spirit of childhood.

A wild surmise leaps up: maybe Hook is going to be a true work of the imagination, something quick and wildly improvising, like a child's account of a made-up adventure. But the real function of this sequence is to provide a humble contrast to the excesses that follow, rendering the well-publicized gazillions that have been lavished on Hook all the more impressive.

The special effects -- they mostly involve flying -- have a nice, tossed-off air about them. The sets are spectacular, but their scale and luxe become oppressive. And they impose a peculiar burden on the director. He has a terrific way with action sequences, a genius for inventive detail that reads clearly even at his preferred pace, which is warp speed. But even he has to strain to fill these spaces; and his resort to a food fight, symbolizing Peter's rebonding with his old pals, the Lost Boys, is dismal and realized without conviction.

Since so many of Spielberg's movies have dealt with abandoned or abducted children (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Empire of the Sun, just to name the top of the line), no one can doubt the director's emotional attachment to his material. It's just that he has chosen the wrong way to demonstrate it. In effect, he has spoiled his brainchild rotten. Hook is not bratty, which might at least have been fun. It's stuffy, like one of those overdressed rich kids, standing forlorn in the corner at a party, afraid of ripping his clothes.

John Williams' score, all thunder, lightning and self-importance, reinforces the film's charmlessness, and Hoffman's Hook emblematizes it. He's broody and self-absorbed, utterly gleeless in his villainy. But then even Robin Williams, that freest of comic spirits, never has a truly antic moment. Roberts, as Tinkerbell, is luckier than her co-stars. Her character has no obligation to try to fill the already overstuffed screen. Couldn't possibly do it anyway, since she's only a wee little fairy, a couple of inches tall. But Roberts is ingenuous, unaffected and what Hook is only some of the time -- light on her wings.