With a Simper

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TELL ME A RIDDLE Directed by Lee Grant Screenplay by Joyce Eliason and Alev Lytle

This is the way Eva's world ends: not with a bang but a simper. She is an aged immigrant, almost totally withdrawn from husband and family, living immersed in memory and in imaginary dialogues with great literary and political figures of history. Stricken by cancer, she is taken on a farewell visit to children and grandchildren, reaching a final resting place in the San Francisco pad of a hippy granddaughter. Eva finds in the girl an echo of her own past, and she makes some inarticulate efforts to pass on her heritage. But as played by Lila Kedrova, the old woman mostly seems merely gaga. It is sometimes hard to determine whether her grimaces are meant to convey joy or pain or simply the frustration of an actress trying to find a part that no one quite bothered to write out for her. The doughty trouper Melvyn Douglas, playing her husband, seems similarly afflicted. Both performers are the victims of Lee Grant's direction, which is diffident and lacks both elan and a clear viewpoint.

The problem here is a familiar one: reverence for a literary source, a delicate novella by Tillie Olsen, has rendered its adapters dumbstruck. Trying to remain faithful to her realistic surfaces and unable--except through uninformative flashbacks--to reveal the inner workings of Eva's sensibility, the film makers have avoided anything that might be melodramatic or even openly emotional. All the suffering in Tell Me a Riddle is thus stoic, all triumphs without joy. Movement is glacial, dialogue wooden, characterizations blurred. One has a feeling that this project--brought to fruition without the financial support of the film industry, by three young woman producers who love the Olsen work--is faithful to the letter of the book, but heedless of the need to give the story a freer, less cautious life in a new medium. What sympathy one feels for the attempt to solve difficult problems of translation is soon submerged in a tedium that could be dangerous. A couple more minutes of this stuff could lead to Altered States--or anyway, to trying to remember where it, or some other lively yarn, is playing.

--Richard Schickel

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