Short Takes

TELEVISION

Putting the Cops On the Couch

"I WAS HOPING THAT YOU MIGHT BE willing to discuss your feelings about the Kronauer case." Nothing is irredeemable, but any cop show that begins with a line like that is in deep trouble. CRIME & PUNISHMENT, a new NBC series from Dick Wolf (Law & Order), introduces perhaps the worst gimmick of the season: each week's account of a crime and its subsequent investigation is interrupted by "interviews" with the key participants, conducted by an unseen questioner who sounds like a cross between smarmy therapist and Grand Inquisitor. The show is an odd mixture of '60s-style caper film (the crimes are quaint jewel heists and embezzlement schemes) and third-rate thirtysomething (hip relationship talk between the featured detectives). It deserves a quiet execution.

MUSIC

Omnipotent Fingers

GLENN GOULD WAS A GLORIOUS ECCENtric: a concert dropout; a reclusive, self- promoting ascetic; a pianist of Horowitzian technique who, with curious exceptions like Bizet and Sibelius, usually shunned the Romantics. Sony Classical's magnificent GLENN GOULD EDITION, to be completed in 1994, presents Gould's entire recorded oeuvre (much of it previously unreleased). His Haydn is superb; his Mozart and Beethoven range from riveting to risible; his moderns dazzle. Above all, sensibility and omnipotent fingers made him a peerless contrapuntalist, who could with uncanny rhythmic acuity articulate multiple lines and transmute complex musical thought, especially Bach's, into pure and exciting expression.

BOOKS

Kid Stuff

JOHN GRISHAM'S EARLIER THRILLERS The Firm and The Pelican Brief were a bit overwhooped and underthrilling. But his newest novel THE CLIENT (Doubleday; $23.50) works a lot better, possibly because the author's wide-eyed narrative style fits the title figure. Mark Sway is the kind of 11-year-old boy who picks trouble out of the air the way a seagull fields thrown french fries. He becomes the client of a bodacious middle-aged woman defense attorney by overhearing a gabby, Mob-connected New Orleans lawyer as this fellow is rambling his way toward suicide. Soon the clownish Mafia and the stumblebum cops are chasing after Mark and his motherly mouthpiece. Gnome alone! Hide Nintendo and try this one on your clever 11-year-old.

CINEMA

Drift and Disorder

A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN (JILL CLAYburgh) abruptly leaves home and family for no reason she cares to articulate. Her husband (Albert Finney) mopes and eats mayonnaise-and-potato-chip sandwiches. Their younger daughter drops out of high school. An older daughter drops back in on their South Carolina home, married, pregnant and edgy. The domestic disorders of the Odom family are shown quite realistically in RICH IN LOVE. But they are not comically or dramatically painted by writer Alfred Uhry and director Bruce Beresford (the Driving Miss Daisy team) as the movie drifts to a predictably sweet conclusion. Its heart is surely in the right place, but it desperately needs a pacemaker.

THEATER

Reinventing Gravity

( CALL THEM PERFORMANCE ARTISTS, call them mimes, call them dancers or acrobats or circus clowns. Whatever the label for their joyous, wordless, surreal FOOL MOON, which opened on Broadway last week, David Shiner and Bill Irwin are magicians of the human body. They grow or shrink a foot in a twinkling. They reinvent gravity so that a cane mysteriously tugs one along the floor to the right while an umbrella lofts the other up and to the left. Irwin can collapse his lanky body to fit within a trunk and seem to descend three flights of stairs doing it. Shiner lures volunteers from the audience to uncork their imagination, turning camp into art. As a team they are exquisite, raffishly dancing a Tea for Two one wishes went on forever.