Hells of Ivy

By JAY COCKS

THE PAPER CHASE

Directed and Written by JAMES BRIDGES

The absurd importance of certificates, permissions, licenses and ratings in all our lives, the pursuit of success not for fulfillment but only for achievement--these are the subjects of The Paper Chase, a movie of some incidental pleasures and insights and a great deal of silliness. Director-Writer Bridges (The Baby Maker) uses a typically tense year at Harvard Law School as a metaphor for the reflexive mania of competition, trying to squeeze into a school term a full complement of crosscurrents in the American national character. His designs for his story (adapted from a novel by John Jay Osborn Jr.) seem rather too hefty to be sustained by such a modest narrative, however. Bridges, like his hero, gets trapped in his ambitions.

What Bridges catches best is the peculiar tension of the classroom, the cool terror that can be instilled by an academic skilled in psychological warfare. His Ivy League Olympian is Kingsfield, a professor of contract law who passes along scholarship with finely tempered disdain. In an original bit of casting, Kingsfield is played by Veteran Theater and Film Producer John Houseman. It is a forbidding, superb performance, catching not only the coldness of such a man but the patrician crustiness that conceals deep and raging contempt.

Bridges' hero is a bright law student named Hart (Timothy Bottoms). Hart fears Kingsfield yet feels a cockeyed respect for him. He divides his time between going up against Kingsfield in the classroom and cuddling up with his daughter Susan (Lindsay Wagner), for whom he develops a healthy passion. Bridges is concerned with the cruelty of an academic system--and by extension, a whole system of professional survival--that measures success by assigning letters or numerals or awarding documents. Yet the grades seem just as important to him as to his hero. The dramatic device that gives The Paper Chase its unity and tension is the question of whether Hart will get his grades, whether he will ace-out Kingsfield's course.

Once Hart gets what he wants, he decides he doesn't care. Many of his classmates have been ravaged by the intensity of the competition, and one has even attempted suicide, but all the frustration and agony is abruptly reduced to pettiness by the film's infuriating last scene.

We are never told why Hart wants so much to succeed, since Bridges does not portray the origin or meaning of his ambition. His last, too easy gesture of mocking his achievement thus looks not only frivolous and empty-headed but contemptuous. It means that the students brought themselves to the edge of hysteria for nothing, that one tried to kill himself for nothing, that we were manipulated into caring about it all for nothing.

.Jay Cocks

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