Low Life

By JAY COCKS

STAY HUNGRY

Directed by BOB RAFELSON

Screenplay by CHARLES GAINES and BOB RAFELSON

Uncle Albert may be daft--he carries a small pocket telescope to spy upon squirrels--but he is still concerned about his nephew Craig. Since the death of his parents, Craig (Jeff Bridges) has been living in the family home on a hill outside Birmingham, with only one black servant (Scatman Crothers) and a lot of pictures of himself for company. "It is time," Uncle Albert advises by letter, "to seek the comforts of your traditions." Craig's traditions are genteel Southern, wilted aristocratic, but they are small solace. What really compels Craig is what his deceased parents might have called "slumming." He is fascinated by the town oddballs, turned on by the low life at the bottom of the hill.

Craig and a pal from the country club get themselves mixed up in a real estate deal with a trio of bad-ass good ole boys who want to buy up a block of downtown property and build a highrise. Craig's job is to purchase a rundown hangout for body building called the Olympic Spa. The boys should have known better. Craig gets sucked into the strange rituals of the place, the exercises, the competition and--most of all --the mystical subculture of pumping iron. He makes friends with Joe Santo (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a former Mr. World and Mr. Universe), and starts an intimate exercise program with Mary Tate Farnsworth (Sally Field), an employee of the spa. The real estate deal gets less real, but Craig hardly gives it a thought. He is too busy searching for himself among the barbells.

Funky Spirit. It is an unusual place to look for truth, but Bob Rafelson makes movies (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens) in which that search is always eccentric, the conclusion indefinite. Like Bobby Dupea, the runaway pianist of Five Easy Pieces, Craig is spiritually disenfranchised, in flagrant rebellion against his class. Craig revels in the funky spirit at the Olympic, and Rafelson, with his offbeat sense of humor, his knack for visual surprise, turns the spa into a suitably shabby field of honor. Joe Santo trains for the Mr. Universe competition by pressing weights in a Batman getup. The owner of the Olympic, a toupeed madman who calls himself Thor Erickson (R.H. Armstrong), spies on Mary Tate through a peephole in the floor, finally goes berserk after inhaling a noseful of poppers and, in the film's scariest scene, tries to rape her and murder Craig.

Stay Hungry is raucous, inventive and enterprising; it is also disheveled and dishonest. Rafelson presents Craig's peers as dissipated, insensate boors, and his family as a tribe of implacable snobs.

By contrast, the Olympic crew seem like wholly admirable free spirits -- and the match is not a fair one. Joe Santo is a connoisseur of cut glass, an accomplished fiddle player and something of an out-of-pocket philosopher. "I don't believe in getting too comfortable," he tells Craig. "Stay hungry."

Rafelson works cool wizardry with actors, and there are many good performances here, especially by John David Carson as one of the country-club louts and Gary Goodrow as a manager-promoter. The movie lingers, but it does not persuade. The characters are too pat, their predicaments too flexible and too easily surmounted. There is even a fairly conventional happy ending, something novel for Rafelson, but it rings false. Uncle Albert's advice to Craig may not have been out of place, after all. Rafelson might think it over too. sbJay Cocks

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