EXHALING SUDS

By RICHARD CORLISS

SHE HAS THE SCARIEST EYES IN movies. They can radiate pain or anger with the immediacy of a lightning flash and the intensity of a witch's curse. Angela Bassett should be cast as Medusa or Medea, but because she is a movie star, she plays righteous cops and sanctified wives. She ought to be in terrific films; instead she appears in mediocre ones, where she stands out like Callas singing Feelings and shines like her own amazing, reproachful eyes.

Bassett does all the heavy emotional lifting in Waiting to Exhale, based on Terry McMillan's best seller. It's the old story--as old as Four Daughters in the '30s or The Best of Everything in the '50s or Now and Then last fall--about a quartet of young females looking for love and identity. Here the setting is Phoenix, Arizona, and the women are black, but everything else is familiar. Bernadine (Bassett) finds that her longtime husband is deserting her; Savannah (Whitney Houston) has a lover who won't leave his wife; Gloria (Loretta Devine) can't get her bisexual ex-husband into bed; and Robin (Lela Rochon) shacks up with a virtual Fiesta Bowl Parade of losers. The men are all rotters except for two perfect guys (Gregory Hines and Wesley Snipes) who are ennobled by watching their good wives die.

Like most soap operas, this one wins hot tears from its audience by imagining the worst things that could happen to decent people. It ties its women to the railroad tracks of caprice and invites us to watch as a betraying beau comes chugging toward them. Waiting to Exhale doesn't have the idiot vigor to become a camp classic like the movie Valley of the Dolls. Forest Whitaker, a laid-back actor who directs this slow-fuse movie, lets his divas strut, smolder and tell off the skunks they once loved. This ain't art--it's more like tasty junk food. And Bassett provides the special sauce.

--By Richard Corliss