Breaking Up

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SMASH PALACE

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Screenplay by Roger Donaldson, Peter Hansard and Bruno Lawrence

TOO FAR TO GO

Directed by Fielder Cook

Screenplay by William Hanley

Man is born to toil, and to be obsessive about his labors. Woman was born to complain: "You never pay any attention to me." More divorce wars seem to start with this skirmish than with anything else these days, and the virtues of Smash Palace begin with the simple fact that it has observed the phenomenon closely and painfully. Odd that we have to look as far away as New Zealand (not exactly one of our major movie centers) for what may be the most melodramatic but also the most acutely motivated film yet about divorce.

The title is obviously symbolic, but it is also quite literal, the name of the auto-salvage company run by a race driver Al Shaw (Bruno Lawrence, a strong actor who also worked on the script). His wife Jacqui (Anna Jemison) and his daughter Georgie (Greer Robson, a child of uncommon appeal) must attempt to create their small domestic civilization among the rusting reminders of the larger civilization's discontents. When Jacqui cannot get Al to stop tinkering with his cars, she starts tinkering with his best friend. One cannot help sympathizing with her; it is clear that she is seeking human warmth more than sexual heat. But, it develops, she also has a taste for revenge. Why shouldn't Al feel some of the chill she endured all those years with him? When she moves out she forbids him access to their daughter, and the maneuver sends him in short, beautifully logical steps up the scale of frustration from startled hurt to an outrage that is almost lethally self-destructive. By the end he has kidnaped Georgie and precipitated an armed confrontation with the riot squad. Unlike the male anger that brought Shoot the Moon to its dissatisfying conclusion, this rage is explicated. We have watched it grow out of the relationship's contentious core, and we know whom to blame for its explosion, a wife who has tried to score one point too many. We also know whom we are rooting for, namely a man who has been driven temporarily insane.

It is possible that Smash Palace is either very brave or very foolish in its refusal to calculate how its moral is likely to anger feminists. But since it is a movie stamped with integrity in every frame, it seems more likely that it was made with no ideology in mind, just a desire to show how a specific marriage was put asunder. Al and Jacqui may or may not be typical, but they are poignantly particularized people without a drop of soapsuds clinging to them.

In contrast, Too Far to Go is a no-fault movie. Actually it was, and remains, a television show, based on John Updike's short stories about how Joan and Richard Maple drifted apart. It is being given a second life in the theaters because someone up there at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios liked it and thought the film deserved a second chance. It is hard to see why. The Maples are a couple who seem to have no great quarrel with each other, therefore no reason for their philandering ways. Their divorce, when it comes, is just like their marriage: civilized, ruefully witty and without the slightest resonance. Blythe Banner has an agreeable asperity as Joan; Michael Moriarty has a disagreeable whininess as Richard. He should have been dissuaded from an attempt at an Ivy League accent, which turns him into a male chauvinist prig. But let the blame fall where it truly belongs: on a scenario by William Hanley that is without persuasive incident or dialogue, direction by Fielder Cook that is without texture or viewpoint. The aim here was obviously to do something elegant and up-market for television. The result is a bloodless bore on a screen of any size. --By Richard Schickel

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