Family Values Get Real

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: GAS FOOD LODGING

WRITER AND DIRECTOR: ALLISON ANDERS

THE BOTTOM LINE: A no-budget look at adolescence and lower-class life -- smart, tough and compassionate.

Adolescents, as everyone in the movie business knows, are a market, not an audience. You do anything you can to separate them from their allowances -- pimple-brained comedies, incoherent action films, imbecilic slasher flicks -- but you do nothing to connect them with the realities of the often desperate passage they are attempting to navigate.

Teenagers (and most other people for that matter) are likely to encounter Gas Food Lodging only by chance, given its modest release pattern and the fact that it is going forth unpopulated with major stars, unequipped with big-time advertising and utterly devoid of glamour. But Allison Anders' film is like its main characters -- spunky, smart, tougher than they look -- and one wants to believe that the film, like them, will somehow make its way in an uncaring world.

Based on a novel by Richard Peck, it's about a single mom named Nora (Brooke Adams), living in a trailer park in a small New Mexico town, working as a waitress in a roadside restaurant, at once harried and patient (and wonderfully authentic) as she tries to raise two daughters. The younger of them, Shade (Fairuza Balk), narrates the story of a crucial few months in their lives. She has a busy, dreamy mind. She may moon over the romantic fictions shown at a little Hispanic theater and end up falling for the Latino boy who works as its projectionist. But she's also up and doing -- looking for (and eventually finding) her lost dad, arranging a really awful blind date for her mother. Her sister Trudi (Ione Skye) is more troubled and rebellious. She has a "fast" reputation, and a sexual trauma in her past, a doomed love affair and an unwanted pregnancy in her future.

Both young actresses achieve an unforced naturalism in their work, and so does Anders, whose first major feature this is. A single mother (and once a welfare client), she is less interested in making melodrama -- or ideological points -- out of these lives than she is in showing how testy affection and a $ talent for emotional improvisation can sustain "family values" in no-budget circumstances. Anders' film is a compassionate meditation on the desperate lengths to which poverty-ridden decency must go to preserve itself. As such, it makes ruminations on this subject by the likes of Dan Quayle look supremely irrelevant. She's talking reality; they're talking country-club theory.