Funny Valentine

By J.C

LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING Directed by ALAN J. PAKULA Screenplay by ALVIN SARGENT

"You whistle," Walter Elbertson says in desperate accusatory tones.

"And you wheeze," replies Lila Fisher, maintaining her emotional equilibrium.

Walter (Timothy Bottoms) is the son of a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian. He is clumsy, insecure, racked by asthma. Dad tries to get him to go back to the psychiatrist ("You won't have to lie on the couch this time"), but Walter will have none of it. So he is dispatched on a summer-long bicycle trip through Spain, lagging badly behind the other collegiate types in the group. Walter pedals hard and wheezes ferociously, but finally chucks it all to join a guided tour conducted in the comfort and relative safety of an air-conditioned bus. There he meets Miss Fisher (Maggie Smith), and to their mutual astonishment, they fall in love.

Miss Fisher is congenitally clumsy, addled despite her sternest efforts at control, and at least a full generation older than Walter. He is nevertheless severely smitten. The movie is at its quiet best, funny and affectionate, as it chronicles their unlikely courtship. Walter woos Miss Fisher by rushing her, trying to blow her off her unsteady feet with little gusts of adolescent energy. They nearly do not get together. Miss Fisher, despairing of herself and of some mysterious, occasionally violent speech impediment, attempts suicide, but is revived by the eager Walter, who finds himself bleating all manner of hortatory cliches:"We're free!"; "We have to smile in the rain!"; "We're coming alive!" Soon they whistle and wheeze together.

Maggie Smith, a superb actress, is a peerless comedienne. With her own fractured regality, a tenuous dignity that seems to invite comic disaster, she can make haggard bits like tripping or falling out of bed seem instantly fresh and funny.

Bottoms is not so well trained or certain an actor. He wields his natural timidity like a staff with which he hopes to beat the role into submission. His adolescent dewiness turns damp, his confusion becomes less consistently comic than congealed into mannerism. Of course, he is burdened with a role that is rather too severely sentimentalized. His Walter is blood kin to Pookie Adams of The Sterile Cuckoo (which represents the previous collaboration of Director Pakula and Scenarist Sargent), with none of Pookie's surface brashness and vigor. As played and as written, Walter never sheds the tentativeness and the fear that his relationship with Miss Fisher ought to have changed. He begins to act a good deal more assured, but like the film's peculiar ending, that assurance still seems a bit like a charade.

J.C.

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