Haunted by History

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: WATERLAND

DIRECTOR: STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL

WRITER: PETER PRINCE

THE BOTTOM LINE: A tormented time traveler tries to make peace with his past in a challenging, absorbing film.

Taking leave of his students upon his involuntary retirement, a high school teacher named Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons) tells them why he chose history as his subject. He was in Germany at the end of World War II. The horrors he witnessed were incomprehensible to him. He could deal with them only by inserting them into historical narrative, which granted them a spurious coherence and him the distance he required to live with them.

There may be some truth in this apologia. But it is also clear by this time -- very late in this knotty, curiously absorbing adaptation of Graham Swift's novel -- that Crick is speaking metaphorically too. For Mr. Crick is no Mr. Chips, and the history that most profoundly haunts him is personal.

It contains, among other matters, madness, incest, something very close to fratricide and an abortion the consequences of which reverberate down the years. All of this is reflected in Crick's face and manner -- full of suppressed torment -- and in the eerie, sweetly stated hysteria of his barren wife, Mary (Sinead Cusack), who endures false pregnancies and indulges in kidnapping in an attempt to fulfill her need for motherhood.

Mary is this history's principal victim, possibly beyond help or redress. But Tom must tell their story too, and in the telling try to give it some logical shape, find some instructive meaning in it. So he begins using it in his classroom, at once discomfiting and fascinating his students.

And the film's audience. For director Gyllenhaal has worked some striking variations on standard flashback technique, visual bestartlements that fling us, edgy and disconcerted, from 1974 Pittsburgh, where the film's framing action takes place, to England in the wartime '40s. There, in the Fens, the ; East Anglian coastal marshlands that provide the film's title, the young Tom and Mary (Grant Warnock and Lena Headey) fall in love.

Or should one say lust? Anyway, what happens to them is careless and heedless. The actors bring a terrifying, clarifying force to their representation of an unsentimental sexual education, more powerful than any the movies have lately given us. There is something of Adam and Eve in their innocence. Except that as flashbacks within the flashback unfold, we realize that this Adam is already tainted by something like original sin, visited on him by his family's history (and symbolized by the hulking, tragic presence of his mentally deficient older brother), and that this Eve's temptation is, if anything, more clearly prefigured than that of her biblical model.

The movie risks (and sometimes falls into) pretentiousness as it reaches for (and often attains) an authentically original tone. What it says, through the metaphor of these lives, is that the burden of history has grown too heavy to bear, that we can no longer hope to master it. Our best hope lies in shedding it and finding our way back to a prelapsarian state. At the end, ambiguously, Tom and Mary seem to be heading in that direction. It is the only imaginable conclusion to an ambitious and challenging film.