Memoir into Melodrama

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Most of the time our interest in a movie -- especially the American variety -- is plot propelled. Here are some pretty people. Let's see what's going to happen to them in this or that difficult situation. Oh, no, not that! Watch out! Look behind you!

Our interest in a memoir, especially a good one like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, is voice-activated. It's not so much the tale as the teller, the tone he takes about himself, what he makes out of past experience, that seizes and holds our attention. It follows that an autobiography is not the ideal foundation for a movie; the two forms are antithetical. It also follows that This Boy's Life, though seriously meant and conscientiously made, doesn't quite work.

, The script by Robert Getchell, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, contains some elisions and some dramatic heightening, but nothing outrageous. It opens with a young Toby (nicely played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his mother Caroline (Ellen Barkin) adrift in the West in the 1950s, looking for work. She's penniless, on the run from a broken marriage and an inappropriate lover. She has a good heart but not a very sensible one, and she falls in with Dwight Hansen (Robert De Niro), an auto mechanic from dreary Concrete, Washington.

Dwight cloaks social insecurity and class resentments under a manner that combines masculine swagger, noisy politesse and a need to ape -- and impose on Toby -- a poorly observed version of middle-class morality. Toby must have a paper route, but it is Dwight who pockets the profits. Toby must learn the manly art of self-defense, but mostly Dwight teaches him sucker punches and uses the lessons as an excuse to beat on the boy. De Niro's is a domineering performance, a star turn that is both comic and menacing, but it unbalances Wolff's story.

Caroline is almost lost in the film's later passages. And though the other aspects of this boy's life -- bad companions, sulky delinquency, a muted, sweetly stated homoerotic flirtation -- are present, they tend to pale in comparison with the brutal conflict between these two men-children.

This is not De Niro's fault. The movie goes where movies must go: toward melodrama. And toward the current fashion (Jack the Bear, Radio Flyer) for taking up but not fully confronting child abuse. Something more subtle is going on in Wolff's book, a confrontation with a richer, quirkier past and his emerging self that the movie too often brushes aside.