Theater Game

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BETRAYAL

Directed by David Jones

Screenplay by Harold Pinter

"I've always liked Jerry. To be honest, I've always liked him rather more than I've liked you."

The speaker is Robert. The listener is his wife Emma (as in Bovary?). The subject under discussion is his best friend, who he has just discovered has been having an affair with Emma these many years. It is not bitterness that dictates Robert's tone. He is, as he says, telling the exact truth. For he is the sort of modern man, up on the literature (and the movies and the plays), who expects husbands and wives to be unfaithful but is really quite shocked to find that his best friend is cheating on him.

Of course, he should have known better. Jerry is not only his college chum and a literary agent with whom Robert, a publisher, has done much mutually profitable business. He has also been Robert's habitual squash partner, but lately he has been avoiding the courts. Obviously any man who treats the rituals of male bonding in such a cavalier fashion is capable of anything.

But if the first thing Betrayal undermines is our expectations of conventional moral responses, that is not the last or even the most important of its reversals. Adapting his own play, Pinter has retained the device that supplied its theatrical renown, a reverse structure. This is no mere matter of flashbacks. Rather, Pinter charts the entire course of Jerry's affair with Emma backward, starting with a wistful coda, then proceeding through breakup, Robert's discovery of what the couple is up to, the rental of a love nest, the first illicit meeting, the initial acknowledgment of mutual attraction, with which the film ends. There is something smug and self-conscious about this conceit, but it is also unbalancing. Since the triangle cliche is so familiar, the only possible way to impart suspense is by focusing on what happened first.

Pinter also overturns one's stylistic expectations. When the English upper crust gets to pip-pipping about infidelity, the viewer settles back prepared for a comedy of manners. What he gets here is very little comedy, a great many mannerisms, and none of the sentiment that Noel Coward used to employ to make things come right at the final curtain. Betrayal must be understood, then, as a critique of a theatrical style and of unthinking audiences who have been having an amoral laugh and a tickle with it for years.

Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) plays Robert, Patricia Hodge is Emma, and Jeremy Irons is their friend, and they are brisk, expert and rather too much of an ensemble. There is not enough contrast of tone between them. The fault may be not of their making, since they are being asked to play theatrical conventions instead of people. David Jones' direction reinforces the problem: elegantly geometrical in its calculation of cuts and angles, it is uninterested in the higher calculus of the emotions. This all serves the text but not the irresistible demands of the movie medium for emotional intensity. Film finally betrays Betrayal as an overly stylized, schematic work in love with its own design, unedifying about the people trapped within its grid. --By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.