Just Alive

A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG

Directed by PETER MEDAK Screenplay by PETER NICHOLS

It begins as an ordinary day in a distinctly uncommon marriage. Bri (Alan Bates) comes home to his Bristol flat after a typically wretched time teaching school. His wife Sheila (Janet Suzman) has tea waiting and dinner warming in the oven. They joke together, Bri tries to coax Sheila into bed, and their only child comes home from school. She is called, with a mixture of brutal humor and despair, Joe Egg. She is autistic, beyond help and hope--a child barely aware of her own life who slumps in her high chair like a boiled vegetable.

Around Joe, Bri and Sheila have constructed an elaborate masquerade. To deal with the pain of her presence, they make jokes about her and about themselves, awful mocking fantasies full of guilt. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is not about a retarded child, however, but about the dissolution of a marriage. "She's only just alive," Sheila says once about Joe. "But she's the life we've made." That is exactly why Bri tries to destroy her.

Originally a play that had a good run in both London and Manhattan, Joe Egg was written by Peter Nichols, himself the father of a spastic child. Boisterous and harrowing, it is a macabre tour de force. But Nichols' adaptation for the screen is stubbornly stagebound, and the young Hungarian director Peter Medak does nothing to liberate it. The film seems forced and artificial, and the bilious lighting makes it look as if it had been staged inside a plastic showcase.

Alan Bates (The Fixer, Women in Love) is an actor of supreme craftsmanship, but here he is strangely irresolute. The part calls for him to perform a couple of vaudeville turns, imitating the Mitteleuropaeischer doctor who first diagnosed the child's brain damage and a batty vicar who tries to help. Bates pushes for the comedy as he does for almost every other emotion, and the strain shows. Miss Suzman, who last appeared as Alexandra in Nicholas and Alexandra, is good when Sheila is tough and tart but bad when she is tender. When she recalls finding Joe playing with building blocks in a way that just for that one moment gave faint promise of normality, Miss Suzman recites the monologue as if it were a recipe for crumpets. " J.C.

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