The Road to Nowhere

By * Richard Schickel

RAFFERTY AND THE GOLD DUST TWINS

Directed by DICK RICHARDS Screenplay by JOHN KAYE

Rafferty (Alan Arkin) is a depressed drunk who has spent 20 boring years in the Marine Corps, and now quietly despises his job administering driving tests for the California department of motor vehicles. The "twins" are Mac (Sally Kellerman), who is drifting around the country vaguely looking for a job singing country music, and Frisbee (Mackenzie Phillips), a teen-age orphan who is just plain drifting. Frisbee may not be as tough as she thinks she is, but she is definitely not as appealing as the people who made this movie seem to think she must be.

The girls meet Rafferty in a park where he has gone to spend his lunch hour sucking on his pint of rye. They inexplicably abduct him (using a gun loaded with blanks), let him escape and then permit him to rejoin them when he decides that careening around the country may be more interesting than what he has been doing.

Raw Edginess. Probably it is--but barely, since the relationship that develops among the trio is predictable to anyone having the faintest familiarity with road pictures. Rafferty and Mac become transient lovers, the better to serve as surrogate parents for Frisbee, thus buffing some of the raw edginess off her personality. After a while Mac wanders off with a bandleader, the cops return the kid to an orphanage, and Rafferty rescues her so that they can once more set forth on the road to nowhere.

In some contexts one might be led to imagine that Rafferty has obscene designs on the child-woman, but not here. It is an essential premise of movies like this that losers are sweet, which is one of our more boring cinematic conceits. So is the inevitable contrast drawn between the principals and the harsh, empty, neon-lit landscapes through which they move. Following form, all their encounters are of course with minor characters, who are either moronic or teetering on the edge of psychopathic violence--sometimes both. This movie seems to exist mainly to prove that Director Richards, who did a determinedly picturesque western (The Culpepper Cattle Co.), can do gas stations, sleazy motels and roadhouses as well. He even manages to include, as a sort of director's showcase, the standard Las Vegas sequence, in which that afflicted city is once again visualized as the American dream perceived through a fever.

The film is technically competent enough and in its small way inoffensive. But it is all familiar surfaces. Needed are people, characters of a little depth or originality, or, at the least, some fresh angle of directorial vision to pique our curiosity, arrest our attention. Neither, alas, is available in Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins.

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