Antic Storms, Lopsided Charm

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TEX Directed by Tim Hunter; Screenplay by Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter

In the old days a Walt Disney movie would have concentrated all its considerable sentimental energies on just one of the situations taken up in Tex. That would have been the forced sale (to pay the grocery and utility bills) of Rowdy, the horse much beloved by its adolescent title character. But even in small Oklahoma towns the world moves on, becomes more complicated; and before this modest, intelligent and entirely engaging movie concludes, young Tex has not only come to terms with Rowdy's loss, but been introduced to almost all the other perils a youngster must cope with these days: drugs, crime, sex, class distinctions, absent parents. The last of these is not the least of these. Tex and his sober, conventionally ambitious brother Mason are pretty much on their own in their tumbledown ranch house. Their mother is dead and their father is a rodeo performer who often forgets to send money home to the boys. In teen-age fantasies, the kind of autonomy they enjoy is widely held to be ideal, and it may be that the largest purpose of the movie, faithfully based on one of S.E. Hinton's popular novels for young people, is to demonstrate to the impressionable that imagined Edens generally turn out to have a rather large and very real reptilian population.

The film's grace derives in part from Director Tim Hunter's brisk and unpretentious style, an ability to find the values in a scene efficiently, nail them down and move on unfussily. One would like to call it American classicism, if that phrase did not have such a forbidding ring to it. Mostly, however, the joy of the film arises from the acting of its central roles. As Mason, Jim Metzler conveys solidity without stolidity, commonsensicality without priggishness. It is the sort of self-effacing work that often, unfairly, gets overlooked in the movies. That is especially so when paired with a performance like Matt Dillon's as Tex. He's the kind of youngster who blends the antic and the stormy and makes it come out pure lopsided charm. No one has more accurately captured the mercurial quality of adolescence than he has, with anger, rebelliousness, gallantry, goofiness all tumbled together to create a confused, wholly believable vulnerability. When an assistant principal suspends him for loading the typing class's machines with explosive caps, we understand her furious reaction. We can also understand when she uses the occasion to help Tex get a job that may realize his other, better self.

Tex compresses a great deal of melodramatic incident into a short span of time, and it is hard to escape the feeling that there is more here than any real adolescent may ever have to deal with. But that is an afterthought. While the picture is running, its casual naturalism, its refusal to force any single incident to its dramatic or comic limits, its accuracy of tone, texture and pitch keep one persuaded and involved. For a studio that has been trying to regain its grip on contemporary reality, for audiences that must by this time be jaded by the noisy and moronic farcicality of adolescent life as most movies portray it, Tex may prove to be a revelation. At the very least it is an expert entertainment.

-- By Richard Schickel

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