Compulsive Revolutionary

By Jay Cocks

He is the one who sits quietly at the back of the class, always attentive, always taking meticulous notes. He stares myopically through steel-rimmed glasses and speaks with a halting, stumbling shyness. He has been at the university for years now, studying long nights in his shabby apartment, breaking away only for leafleting or demonstrating. He has become politicized as much by his own loneliness as by history, and any kind of action he may take contains equal parts of activism and self-affirmation. As his sense of isolation increases, so does his political commitment. A subtle, intelligent new movie called The Revolutionary charts the course of his radicalization with cool precision, showing that this student mixes in revolution because he must.

The student, called A (Jon Voight), attends a large university "somewhere in the free world" and faithfully goes to meetings of the Campus Radical Committee, a group whose militancy is pretty well confined to in camera debates. A gets busted for disrupting a political rally, and eagerly lies on the stone floor of his cell, scribbling a ringing "statement to the court" on a length of toilet paper. He is freed the next morning without a chance to read it.

Political Paralysis. In a fit of pique, he quits the committee and goes to work for an Old Left group of factory workers. He is expelled from the university for unspecified reasons, then allows himself to be drafted into the Army. He discovers that his unit is going to be sent in to quell a riot in a neighboring town, and so he deserts. Back in the university town, he falls in with a kind of surrogate Weatherman type who keeps taunting him by saying, "You got to have action, right? A little action, huh?" With him, in the film's galvanic last scene, he is about to bomb an unfriendly magistrate.

A's progress from liberalism to violence may be intended as a paradigm of contemporary student politics, but Director Paul Williams is equally interested in the human impulses that shape history. A is certainly no hero, and as a political figure he possesses about as much charisma as the neighborhood poll watcher. His gimpy right leg cripples him physically, and his academic training--plus a lower-middle-class upbringing--tends to paralyze him politically. Unfortunately, The Revolutionary sometimes suffers from the same lingering paralysis. The crucial climactic scene ends with a frame-freeze as A confronts the judge: Will he throw the bomb or not? "The question isn't resolved," says Director Williams, "because I wanted to throw the choice back to the audience." Well and good, but the ending crests without climaxing, reducing the whole scene to "Lady or the Tiger" trickery. Williams also errs occasionally in reproducing the monotony of A's life; the boredom is sometimes not intense enough to be more than just boring.

Interesting Twist. As A, Jon Voight gives an extraordinarily fine performance--his best to date. He can be comic, confused or concerned with equal finesse. The force of his personality gives the role depth, but never overwhelms and smothers it. Collin Wilcox-Horne, as Voight's sometime mistress, has maddening mannerisms that transform her every scene into something akin to an Actors Studio exercise. Jennifer Salt (as a rich girl who becomes interested first in Voight and then in the Movement) and Robert Duvall (as the radical factory worker) help keep the proceedings in a more realistic perspective. Seymour Cassel gives the agitator an interesting twist of paranoia as well as the requisite shot of adrenalin.

There is a good deal of talk these days about bright young film makers, guys in tinted shades who spin their cameras around like tops, talk "commitment," smoke grass and produce exploitative films of the ilk of The Strawberry Statement and The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart. But they are merely today's equivalent of the old studio hacks; it is with film makers like Paul Williams that the future of the industry lies. Williams has talent and insight far beyond his 26 years. He has enough respect for his script--and for his actors--to let the camera record the scene instead of orchestrating it. The Revolutionary is not a totally successful film, but it is an extraordinarily good one--honest, compassionate, meticulously executed. It marks Williams as a film maker not only worth watching but also worth waiting for.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.