Looking for Mr. Goodfather

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It's one of those days for Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams). First he gets fired from his job, then he gets fired from his marriage, pretty much for the same reason: the man has a passion, verging on the unreasonable, for protecting and nurturing children, and it makes more sensible people crazy.

His job is to supply the voices for a Sylvester-and-Tweety type of animated cartoon; he loses it when the villainous cat forces the victimized bird to inhale a cigarette and Daniel insists on improvising antismoking dialogue for the sequence, so that kids in the audience clearly understand the full horror of the noxious weed. Daniel goes on to lose his marriage when he arranges to bring an entire petting zoo into his house as a birthday-party treat for one of his three children. The resulting mess is the last straw for his wife Miranda (Sally Field, expertly walking the line between long-suffering exasperation and ineluctable affection).

A divorce court, naturally, does not look kindly upon unemployed flakes; it refuses Daniel's plea for joint custody and places limits on his visitation rights that are unbearable to the best daddy in Christendom. The world does not look kindly on working moms, and Miranda cannot find a suitable nanny to tend the kids while she pursues her high-powered career in interior design. Thus, out of mutual need, but without Miranda's conscious participation, Mrs. Doubtfire -- that is to say, Daniel in old-lady drag and affecting a Scots accent -- is born. In this role, Daniel not only brings order to a fractured household; he also brings a new orderliness to his own life.

Improbable? Of course. All cross-dressing comedies, from Charley's Aunt onward, are improbable. Most of the fun comes from seeing people fooled by what seems to us, who are in on the joke, a completely penetrable ruse. Curiously enough, what's really unpersuasive about Mrs. Doubtfire -- not to say draggy -- is its nondrag sequences. The children are goody-goodies, without mischief or quirks, and their father's relationship with them is unclouded by even minor impatience, let alone major outrage. The script, by Randi Mayem Singer and Leslie Dixon, presents ideal fatherhood as a form of saintliness.

More immediately, they and director Chris Columbus had to contend with their star's newfound desire (see last year's Toys) to play the holy fool. Williams' head contains a multitude of characters -- some of them real, some of them American archetypes -- and as a vocal quick-change artist, Williams has a unique gift not only for dead-on impersonations of these characters, but also for setting them all free on a babbling stream of consciousness. These manic monologues are impolite and utterly incorrect politically. They articulate our secret, subversive thoughts. His impersonation of Mrs. Doubtfire shows that he can sustain one of these inventions quite wonderfully. But she's chucklesome, heartwarming, and without a subversive bone under her foam-padded bodysuit. And Daniel Hillard, of whom we see entirely too much, is winsome, childlike, too good for this world, the kind of wimped-out modern male Williams ought to be satirizing, not celebrating.

As it happens, Morticia and Gomez Addams (Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia) are also in need of a nanny as Addams Family Values opens, since they are expecting Pubert -- who is born mustachioed. It would have been salutary if Mrs. Doubtfire had been given the job, for it would have been a true test of her mettle. But the job goes to one Debbie Jellinsky (Joan Cusack), who sets about seducing Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) in what proves to be one of ^ the movie's less profitable conceits. Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.

But as both its director (Barry Sonnenfeld) and its writer (Paul Rudnick) have been at pains to point out, the Addamses are a truly functioning, happily extended family, impervious to the discontents of middle-class civilization. Mom and Dad are passionately in love with each other, beamily indulgent of their children and entirely happy in their chosen life-style. "Is the pain unbearable?" Gomez inquires hopefully as Morticia is wheeled into the delivery room, and her enraptured smile is all the answer he requires.

They are, as well, ferocious defenders of their individuality. In the movie's most carefully pointed passage, the older children, Pugsley and Wednesday (Jimmy Workman and the divinely evil Christina Ricci), are shipped off to summer camp, where their resistance to huggy communitarianism and conventional good cheer is exemplary. They can't be brainwashed, even when they are locked into a cabin with tapes of The Sound of Music and other uplifting material. Dragooned into the camp pageant, they organize the other misfits and contrive to burn their blond, blue-eyed chief tormentor at the stake. Bless their twisted souls: they could teach Robin Williams a useful thing or two about what it really means to be "childlike."