Fiscal Fizzle

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ROLLOVER Directed by Alan J. Pakula Screenplay by David Shaber

Doomsday again! But Dr. Strangelove has sunk to the bottom of some obscure think tank, and The China Syndrome has been diagnosed as a disease of the wrist afflicting Ping Pong addicts. From the grandly atomic, our fantasies of Armageddon have apparently deteriorated, in a few short years, to the meanly fiscal. Rollover asks us to contemplate what would happen to our money-market accounts if the Arabs were to withdraw their oil wealth from the Western banking system, convert it into a mountain of gold bars and then sit smirking atop it, watching the rest of the world lapse into a deep depression.

This is not exactly a novel scenario; the scarier financial writers have been mulling it over for years. But there is something brave about Rollover It undertakes to explain, in dramatic terms, how the international monetary system functions and to speculate on how a monkey wrench could be inserted into the computerized, satellite-linked works by which currency is instantaneously traded round the world. Someone whose most sophisticated investment was a flyer in 1944 war bonds may not be able fully to assess these maneuvers, but it is nice to be asked.

A less secure director than Alan Pakula might have succumbed to the temptation to rush through the financial pages of his script in order to get on with the elements of murder, mystery and romance. But as he has proved in films like Klute and All the President's Men, Pakula is a true stylist, a man who sees the world through a slow-panning lens darkly. For him, the corridors of power are menacingly dim and hushed, and by forcing the audience to dwell on his paranoid vision of that maze, the director commands a certain sober respect.

That may be more than his film finally deserves. The plot involves the slow-dawning discovery by a corporate executive's widow (Jane Fonda) and a financial wizard (Kris Kristofferson) that her husband was murdered. She is also in danger because her husband discovered how the oil interests were quietly draining resources away from Wall Street. Neither performer is particularly believable. The romance that develops between them is unfeeling, a sop to the audience's conventional expectations. Kristofferson, in particular, lacks the kind of ruthless intelligence one expects of Wall Street wolves; he seems the last person anyone would ask to explain puts and calls options.

Far more damaging is the childish ease with which these two penetrate the conspiracy. A careless phone call here, a too-trusting security guard there, and all is revealed to them. If these international manipulators are so smart, how come they leave the notebook containing the secret computer code lying around where anyone can read it? Can we really be expected to believe that the conspirators would bring down the financial system--an act as inconveniencing to them as to the rest of the world--just because Jane and Kris (but no one else) have caught on to them?

No, in the end it just does not wash. One is left with a succession of classy, spooky images, a titillated but unsatisfied imagination and the feeling that there is both less and more here than met Pakula's excellent eye. --By Richard Schickel

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