THE INFIRMITIES OF OUR AGE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Poor Shakespeare--obliged to motivate his tragedies with nothing more than seven terribly familiar sins and a smattering of Aristotle. How much richer his works might have been had the blessings of post-modernism been his. He might, for example, have been free to draw openly on incest as a theme instead of dropping little hints of it here and there for the scholars to ferret out 400 years later. And what about recovered memory? That's a dramatic device he never dreamed of.

You have to grant a certain credit to novelist Jane Smiley for the unapologetic boldness with which she appropriated the story of King Lear for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, resettling his mythical Britannic majesty and his fractious daughters on a modern Iowa farm. You also have to admire the nerve with which she attached pop-psych subtexts to her rearrangement, the daring with which she turned the whole works into a feminist tract.

It was the sober realism of her style that redeemed the novel, its weight and conviction that prevented readers from noticing (or caring) that by replacing noble enigmas with banal behaviorism, Smiley had downsized tragedy to melodrama. The movie version--bereft of diverting literary stratagems, relentlessly focused on what-next narrative--takes it another step down--to soap opera.

It's not just that the Lear figure, played by Jason Robards, has been renamed Larry and dressed in coveralls, or that he decides to divide his realm among his daughters for tax purposes, although these devices have a certain flattening effect on the tale. The problem is that it is no longer his tragedy but his children's--Goneril, who is here renamed Ginny and played by Jessica Lange; and Regan, who's called Rose and impersonated by Michelle Pfeiffer; and Cordelia, known now as Caroline and acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The first two, we eventually learn, were incestuously abused by their father when they were children. Rose, who has breast cancer, has never forgotten his long-ago depredations, but they have been buried deep in Ginny's unconscious, from which her sister is determined to dig them out. All this is terribly up to date, "relevant" according to the vulgar standards set for us by the endlessly instructing voices of media shrinks.

But sordid particulars and easy explanations are ever the enemy of tragedy. In this case they transform it--despite a lot of earnest acting of the kind that always seems to have its eye on a year-end prize--into nothing more than a revenge plot. They also rob it of grandeur and universality and deprive us of the pleasure of deriving our own meanings from its characters and events. We know what we think of child molesters, and we are aware of the dread consequences of their acts. On this matter we require no instruction. But a cracked old man, misjudging his powers and the nature of his children? Why yes, we can be moved to vivid identification with him, to pity and terror by his plight. Him we might someday become.

--By Richard Schickel