Petrified Pretensions

By J.C.

Drive, He Said is a bush-league disaster that might have passed unnoticed, and perhaps unmade, but for the participation of Jack Nicholson. His much-touted performance in Easy Rider won him the chance to make a movie almost literally all his own: he collaborated on the scenario for Drive, He Said, then directed and co-produced it. While other fledgling directors would be allowed to fail in comparative privacy, Nicholson's reputation makes his failure agonizingly public.

Nominally about the spiritual agonies of a basketball star at a large university, the movie makes several elaborate feints at symbolism, then quickly collapses under the weight of its petrified pretensions. Nicholson seems to be after a kind of existential melodrama: the basketball player frozen by his own spiritual malaise, with his roommate, the campus radical who goes mad in the last reel, representing the inevitable result of purposeful action in an insane world. But the film is too incoherent to sustain such interpretations. The action sways sloppily between the ballplayer and the radical, straddling an unwieldy subplot concerning the ballplayer's romance with a bitchy, nymphy faculty wife.

Nicholson manages a few nice touches. A scene of attempted rape late in the film conveys just the right feeling of psychotic tension. There is also a funny, if by now familiar, freak-out at the draft board and a shrewd performance by Bruce Dern as the basketball coach. Nicholson is not so fortunate with the other actors. Michael Margotta is scruffy and strident as the radical, William Tepper adenoidal in the role of the basketball player. Karen Black, playing the faculty wife, offers only a dreary variation on her basic Five Easy Pieces performance. It should be pointed out that the title of Nicholson's movie, and the Jeremy Larner novel before it, is derived from a fine short poem by Robert Creeley, which ends "drive, he sd, for/ christ's sake, look/ out where yr going." It is a pointed, challenging caution that Nicholson badly needs to heed.

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