Horseplay

By Frank Rich

EQUUS

Directed by Sidney Lumet

Screenplay by Peter Shaffer

If ever there was a play that has no business being a movie, Equus is it. This drama about a stableboy's crime of passion owed much of its three-year Broadway run to theatrical devices that cannot be reproduced on film. Strip the stagecraft away, and all that remains of Equus is 2% hours of talky debate about shopworn ideas. The poor play stumbles and falls before it can break from the gate.

Equus is an even more tedious movie than it had to be. Usually an energetic film maker, Director Lumet (Network) seems to have thrown up his hands on this one. He shoots Shaffer's original stage script as is, to the point of having characters address monologues directly to the camera. The play's gory climax--the blinding of six horses--is rendered realistically, not mimed as it was onstage. Rather than enhance Equus, Lumet's fidelity to the text accentuates every flaw.

Some of those defects pertain to structure and language, but Equus' main drawback is its philosophical thrust. Like so many other trendy writers, from R.D. Laing to Ken Kesey, Shaffer wonders whether madness may be a greater virtue than sanity in a sterile modern world. In Equus, madness is personified by Alan Strang (Peter Firth), a pretty, blond youth whose sexual desire for horses drives him to blind them; sanity takes the form of Dysart (Richard Burton), a repressed psychiatrist charged with curing Alan of his antisocial passion. In this confrontation between a virile equussexual and an impotent prune, can there be any doubt as to who will emerge the moral victor?

No, there cannot--and that is why Shaffer stalls his inevitable denouement by padding the film's doctor-patient scenes with flashbacks that detail Alan's past. Despite a nude appearance by Jenny Agutter and cameo performances by such fine actors as Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright, Harry Andrews and Eileen Atkins, Equus' digressions are little more than excuses to fetch popcorn.

The exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. -- Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.