Sweet Willie

By R.C.

HONEYSUCKLE ROSE

Directed by Jerry Schatzberg

Screenplay by Carol Sobieski, William D. Wittliffand John Binder

No less likely a sex star has emerged since Miss Piggy. This rodeo raga muffin--with his Indian headbands, his long braided hair, a diamond stud in his left earlobe and a face as seamed and leathery as a football left out in the Texas sun--looks like the last of the red hot Muppets. No matter: the camera loves Willie Nelson. In The Electric Horseman, he simply leaned back, squinted, expectorated a few down-home aphorisms and stole a scene or two from Robert Redford. Now Nelson has been fitted for a sin-and-suffer role out of a '30s weepie--the Leslie Howard part in Intermezzo, to be precise--and he wears it as comfortably as a pair of custom-made boots.

Honeysuckle Rose takes its cue from the plangent homilies of country music. Buck Bonham (Nelson) is a moderately successful singer with a strong, loving wife (Dyan Cannon), an adoring son (Joey Floyd) and--shift to a minor key here--an ambitious girl guitarist (Amy Irving) who snakes her way into Buck's band and bed. Once she and Buck become lovers, the dramatic tension slackens. Seven decades of movie romance have prepared the audience for a climactic reconciliation of Buck and his wife. And since Amy Irving acts as if she bought her clothes and her accent at Bloomingdale's, Buck's infatuation seems perfunctory. It is simply one long bumpy road he must travel on his way back to home and honey.

For much of the trip, though, Honeysuckle Rose provides good, earthy company. And when Nelson and Cannon team to sing a sexy country duet, the romantic charge is as strong as any pairing since Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman--or at least since Kermit and Miss Piggy. --R.C.

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