Low-Altitude Flight

By * Jay Cocks

The comedies of Milos Forman, notably Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball, have commonly been called humanistic, possibly because they refuse to be comfortably confined in any other genre. Their humor is neither primarily verbal nor visual; Forman's particular skill is ingenious observation, creating comedy from character and rigorously familiar situations. But his work also contains a trace of archness, a current of condescension. In none of his films has that tendency been more evident than in his latest, Taking Off.

Forman's subject for his first American film is, promisingly enough, the flight of adolescents, who each summer descend on Greenwich Village to get away from their parents and out on their own. The film opens with a massive audition for potential folk singers, then switches to the resolutely suburban home of Mr. and Mrs. Larry Tyne (Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin), who come to the tardy realization that their daughter has skipped. Tyne and his best friend (Tony Harvey) set out to track her down. They stumble into a local bar, get loaded and reel home, where they have a generous number of nightcaps with their spouses and generally make asses of themselves. Rather clumsily the less-than-novel point is made: parents are self-centered hypocrites who worry about their daughter's taking drugs while they numb themselves nightly with booze.

Forman never gets much farther; he just stands in the same place and keeps turning around. Father makes a second go at it, meets the mother of another fugitive girl and forgets his mission until a phone call from his wife interrupts a budding liaison. The parents join a fic- titious society, S.P.F.C. (Society for Parents of Fugitive Children), experiment with marijuana and make even bigger asses of themselves. The daughter arrives home that night to see her parents, stoned on weed and booze, playing strip poker with another couple from the S.P.F.C. So it goes, one uninspired variation after another.

Unsure of himself and perhaps of America. Forman has resorted to caricatures instead of characterizations, and drawn not on ingenuity but on bile. Even the device of the audition, which Forman has employed in two previous films, reinforces the general feeling of nastiness. He shoots the scene "live" --as far as most of the participants know, it is a real audition--and the fumblings and failings become the source of some crude, easy laughs. In partial compensation there are a couple of very funny performances by Vincent Schiavelli, playing a freak who tutors the S.P.F.C. in the art of blowing grass, and Buck Henry, whose acting shows shrewd restraint and a gratifying lack of the grandstand mugging that marred his appearance in Catch-22.

They help, but not enough to overcome Forman's simplistic misanthropy.

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