Starstruck

By Frank Rich

COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER Directed by Michael Apted Screenplay by Tom Rickman

For about half its length, this film biography of Country Singer Loretta Lynn outdoes even The Buddy Holly Story and The Rose in the show-biz-saga sweepstakes. Care and intelligence are everywhere in evidence. British Director Michael Apted (Agatha) captures both the poverty and pride of the young Loretta's Appalachian homestead without resorting to Hollywood sentimentality or glamorization. Tom Rickman's script uses intimate, telling details as it enthusiastically describes the heroine's gradual transformation from 13-year-old hillbilly bride to Nashville superstar. The cast, especially Sissy Spacek as Lynn --the best role of her career --is always winning.

So what goes wrong? As it sadly turns out, Coal Miner's Daughter is not entirely immune to the tired conventions of backstage movie melodramas. No sooner does Lynn start to hit it big than the film ineluctably slips into the usual Star Is Born cliches. Suddenly, and with only the slightest motivation, the protagonist is afflicted by marital conflict, pill addiction, desperate loneliness and a nervous collapse. True, these tragedies happened in life, but in the movie they seem phony: Lynn's later personal traumas are not so much dramatized as displayed like flash cards for predictable audience response. As the screenplay loses its energy, so does most everything else. Apted's direction takes on the facile, rushed quality of his 1975 film about the rise of a rock star, Stardust. Spacek's big scene, her onstage breakdown, is so imprecisely drawn that she has no chance to duplicate the pathos Ronee Blakley brought to a fictive version of the same incident in Nashville.

Deflating as these anticlimaxes are, they still do not alter the achievement of what has gone before. The early scenes, which unfold in the green hills and gaslit haunts of a dusky rural mining town, are full of flavor and native humor. When the pallid, naive Loretta marries an Army veteran of 19 (Tommy Lee Jones) and moves with him to Washington State to raise a family, the couple's first ignorant encounters with sex and the outside world are conveyed with tender humor rather than condescension. When Loretta gets her first guitar and starts to pick and sing, the audience has no choice but to root for her. Her early successes--in local honky-tonks, on radio and at the Grand Ole Opry--are thrilling because the movie has so carefully delineated just how hard she has worked and how far she has come to realize her showbiz fantasy.

Spacek not only ages and sings convincingly, but she gives her character a spine of strong emotion, of pure innocence and instinctive cracker-barrel wit. Inside the shy and often childish teen-age girl there is always a glimmer of the powerhouse woman she would become. The craggy-faced Jones makes the most of a role that fully capitalizes on both his redneck swagger and salty charm. The supporting cast is also first-rate. Rock Drummer Levon Helm (formerly of the Band) brings flinty dignity to the role of Loretta's laconic but loving father, and Beverly D'Angelo (who played

Sheila in Hair) has a riotous time impersonating Country Singer Patsy Cline. Like Loretta Lynn's music, the characters of Coal Miner's Daughter stay in the mind long after the drama that contains them runs out. --Frank Rich

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