Hacienda Melodrama

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

When Esteban the patron (Jeremy Irons) wakes up horny, saddles his horse and goes out to rape a peasant, you just know this isn't going to turn out to be an idle incident. A little later, when he is outraged at discovering his prepubescent daughter Blanca skinny-dipping with Pedro, his estancia foreman's son, you sense that moment too is going to have its consequences somewhere down the plot line. For from its opening frames, The House of the Spirits announces itself as one of those sagas in which there are no accidents, only portents of big-time ironies to come.

Sure enough, Blanca grows up to be a rebellious Winona Ryder, and Pedro turns into a revolutionary played by Antonio Banderas (of Philadelphia) -- enemy of the privileges Esteban holds dear, progenitor (out of wedlock) of the granddaughter he holds dearer still. When the fascists stage their inevitable coup, it is, of course, the bastard Esteban begot in that long-ago dawn who turns up trying to torture Blanca into revealing Pedro's whereabouts.

For this two-hour film, Isabel Allende's complex, stylish novel has of necessity been stripped to its working parts. Yet the thing works in its goofy way, mainly because Bille August (of Pelle the Conqueror) is a man of apparently dauntless conviction. He has written and directed every scene with serene authority, somehow compelling your belief in what he's doing through his own sublime self-confidence.

His spirit is especially infectious to actors. Take Meryl Streep, for instance. In the early passages she's obliged to play a woman half her age, and one blessed with precognitive powers too. Later on, she turns up as a ghost. But she just sails gloriously through both incarnations, utterly untroubled by doubts in herself or August's enterprise. That's true of her co- stars too. When Irons ages, he adopts an oddly strangled tone that should make you want to laugh. But it doesn't -- at least while the movie's on. Glenn Close as his ferociously virginal sister has to work pretty near Mel Brooks country (Remember Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein?), but she keeps burrowing toward the character's repressed pain -- and quite touchingly reveals it. And if Ryder is the headstrong heiress of a thousand movies, the simple clarity of her playing redeems the cliche.

So it goes -- on through fortune-hunting playboys and good-hearted whores, down to the last oppressed peon. Everything they do and say has been done and said before. But they simply refuse to admit it. The result is not epic cinema as David Lean defined it but as Bette Davis used to play it at Warner Bros. -- where history was a branch of melodrama and the subtler emotions were Xed out on the second-draft screenplay.