Sanforized

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING

WOMAN

Directed by Joel Schumacher Screenplay by Jane Wagner Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner are determined that this time nothing shall go wrong. Their last film, Moment by Moment, about an affair between a bored housewife (Tomlin) and a young drifter (John Travolta), was the movie catastrophe of 1978. Now they would play it safe by playing it funny.

They would proceed from a strong premise--The Incredible Shrinking Man, a deadpan 1957 sci-fi thriller--and give it a feminist twist. While the original protagonist shrank from a dose of radiation, Tomlin's happy homemaker would suffer from exposure to the mysterious ingredients in supermarket products: everything from "tumescent tissue of bull scrotum" to a mad scientist's most corrosive chemicals. The audience would know when to laugh: at the sight of a madcap chase, at a friendly gorilla, at Talk Show Host Mike Douglas. The resulting movie is sometimes very funny. It also represents a waltz step toward popular acceptance by a performer tired of being worshiped by the few. Like former cult favorites Chevy Chase and Steve Martin, Tomlin has made a laff-a-minute movie that will offend nobody -- except the comic's most ardent fans, who will buy tickets and then yell, "Sell-out!"

Shrinking Man worked well as a parable of mankind's impotence and heroism in the atomic age. Slowly and irrevocably, the bland hero withdraws into his Sanforized shirt, moves into his child's dollhouse, tumbles into the cellar and slays a now giant spider with a straight pin. At the end, when he escapes into the star-speckled night, he is so small he almost disappears into the universe. Microcosm and macro cosm are one. He has conquered his des tiny by surrendering to it.

Tomlin and Wagner have no such grand ideas. They aim only to poke fun at the American houseperson's conspicuous consumption -- a bizarrely anachronistic target in the '80s, when every Jane Doe scrutinizes her biodegradable cereal box to make sure it has enough vitamins and minerals. So the film's first half mines the comfy-cozy, utterly on-pitch humor of an old Carol Burnett skit. In the happy California suburb of Tasty Meadows, every room is decorated in the pastels of progressive kindergartens, and the residents' chief concern is ring around the collar. In this cheerfully sterile atmosphere, where brains are not only washed but presoaked, Tomlin's goofy, blissed-out smile serves as both benediction and subversion.

The viewer is likely to smile along too, until Woman invades Cheech and Chong territory for stock comic complications and a slapstick climax. By film's end, the viewer's hopes have shrunk along with wee Lily. The razzle-dazzle finale -- and a barrage of TV commercials and guest appearances by Tomlin and Co-Star Charles Grodin -- may be working:

Incredible is a hit. And so a film that meant to satirize Mad. Ave. techniques has succeeded by manipulating them. The real Lily Tomlin could make a good skit out of this .

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