One More Sad Song

By RICHARD CORLISS

RAGTIME Directed by Milos Forman; Screenplay by Michael Weller

It should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit out of her petticoats and prejudices. Two-shot: Henry Ford and John Pierpont Morgan discuss reincarnation in the Morgan Library. A few chapters later, Coalhouse Walker Jr., a Negro piano player who dares to chart his own destiny as the two plutocrats did theirs, has seized the Morgan Library to avenge an outrage inflicted on his prized Model T. It is a splendid tale with sweeping images and passions, needing no dialogue--just the occasional flash of a newspaper headline and the sound of a ragtime piano, working its funereal strut.

Milos Forman seems to have understood this. The film's first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot--Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first sex goddess--and only glances at or ignores the rest. By taking 155 minutes to tell less than half of Doctorow's 270-page pageant, Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

Call it Ragged Time.

To the cadence of Randy Newman's lovely score, the Family takes center stage--a family as all-American as the Smiths in Meet Me in St. Louis. Father (James Olson) chats of his business successes; Mother (Mary Steenburgen) presides over the housework with quiet grace; Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) dreams of love with a showgirl. But there is something rancid about this slice of apple pie. The pauses at Sunday dinner are laced with anxiety; the ticking of the grandfather clock sounds like the prelude to an explosion of neurotic energy. The detonator is

Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Howard E. Rollins Jr.), a black man whose dignity could be taken or mistaken for arrogance--who, it occurs to Father, "didn't know he was a Negro." Soon enough, that awareness is impressed on him, with tragic results for him, the Family and ragtime New York.

Forman, who inherited this project after Robert Altman was removed by Producer Dino De Laurentiis, is an actor's director. In Ragtime he has .elicited many fine performances: from Olson and Steenburgen, models of rectitude and discreet strength; from Rollins, who carries the film with a heroic charm that sours into fatal righteousness; from Debbie Allen as Walker's doomed love; from Ted Ross and Moses Gunn as two eloquent veterans of injustice who try talking sense and restraint to Coalhouse; and from James Cagney, back on-screen after a 20-year lapse and cool as a leprechaun sphinx in the role of a wily New York City police commissioner. Only Elizabeth McGovern seems out of tune and time. She plays Evelyn Nesbit as the daffily dumb prototype for every bombshell from Marilyn to Bo--cheeks puffed, eyes glazed, tripping through life in a sweet stupor. She weighs the film down before Rollins & Co. have the chance to make it soar.

To dwell on the performances is to admit the ultimate failure of Forman's enterprise. His commitment to the actors allows them the time to bring their characters to quirky behavioral life, but every reaction shot, every unfinished phrase or repeated sentence means that many moments stolen from the Doctorow overview. Forman has taken as gospel the novel's epigraph--Scott Joplin's admonition, "It is never right to play ragtime fast"--reduced a pageant to an anecdote, and sacrificed sweep for nuance. Grateful as one is to have this Ragtime, with its many thrilling performances and its spurts of emotional grandeur, one would now like to see the adaptation Altman might have made. And after that, if you please, the silent version. --By Richard Corliss

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