History Test

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS Directed by Rob Cohen Screenplay by Ezra Sacks

Let's see, did they leave anything out? They have Johnson and Nixon, and the draft lottery (and the anxiety it caused) on television, a confrontation in the Harvard Yard between cops and students, liberated women taking karate lessons and putting on antimale skits, a bookstore being converted into a head shop, a onetime Eagle Scout becoming a member of the Weather Underground, suggestions of a certain uninhibitedness or, anyway, bluntness about sex--why, the principals even set up a menage `a trois toward the end of the picture.

That seems to cover everything significant about student life in the U.S. during the very wonderful late '60s. But the very completeness of the survey offered by A Small Circle of Friends afflicts it with a curious self-consciousness. It comes to seem less a movie than a picture history of an era--one of those tomes that offer a garble of familiar images held together by a pseudohistorical text. Books of that sort make almost no demands. One leafs idly through them, hoping the telephone will soon ring. A film, unfortunately, demands attention, and here one fixes on when and how it will touch the next predictable base rather than becoming very deeply interested in the two boys and a girl whose college careers it follows.

The circle is really a triangle. By far the most engaging side of it is Jessica, played by Karen Allen, a young actress with a pretty, open face and a straightshooting manner that is extraordinarily winning. She is bright, wry, self-amused without being selfabsorbed. Jameson Parker, as a blond, bland Waspy square (he's pre-med), is perhaps a tad too deep into his role, appealing without being truly interesting. Brad Davis (the sweet victim of Midnight Express) proves here that he is really an actor. Playing a hustler carving out a career as a New Journalist, he is as active as he was passive in the ear lier film. One begins to think he overdoes the part, but it may be that he was asked to force his performance by Director Cohen in order to provide the film with energy and cutes.

Throughout the film, there is the feeling that bustle and activity arise not from a deep need to come to grips with the social forces that probably shaped the lives of its young creators, but from hype. It is not just a question of Davis' overextended performance but of scenes pushed out of shape by relentless, hard-driving direction, of a heavily romantic score intended to force responses out of the audience, of melodramatic cadenzas in the writing that are ill prepared for. The members of the Small Circle are not really involved in the larger events of the story; they are acted upon by them but are not really actors in them. Papering over this discontinuity gets the picture into trouble. There are witty, intelligent observations, throw-away lines actually, that skewer some of the nonsense of the '60s. They lead one to think that this movie perhaps started out to be something wiser than it is, that along the way the film makers fell prey to the desire to ingratiate themselves with a generation they might have better served simply by observation and quiet reflection.

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