What Becalms a Legend Most?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BOUNTY

Directed by Roger Donaldson; Screenplay by Robert Bolt

It is all a matter of balance, and if they keep trying they are going to get it right one of these decades. In 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty unquestionably belonged to Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh. The perverse joy that grand actor took in his character's sadism entirely dominated Clark Gable's conventionally heroic Fletcher Christian. In 1962, when Marlon Brando came on board for a star trip, his Mr. Christian took the helm, dramatically speaking, long before his character, leading the mutineers, had seized it. Though Brando was chastised by critics for his excesses, there was something brave in his giddy decision to play the role as a mincing fop who warms to liberal consciousness when he contrasts the rigors of sailing under Bligh with the delights of their long, languorous layover in Tahiti. Inevitably the shades of these wild, rich performances (and the fantasy of what might have been had they been combined in a single film) hover over The Bounty, which tips the balance of interest back to Bligh again but somehow manages to dim both characters into incomprehensibility.

The problem is not with the actors. Anthony Hopkins plays Bligh with neurotically coiled intensity, while in the only strong scene he has, Mel Gibson, as Mr. Christian, shows himself capable of expressing with anguished force the conflict between duty and decency that has been tearing at him. The trouble stems from the crude truncation of a script that began many years ago as blueprint for a two-part David Lean epic. Originally the idea must have been to free the story of its mythical and melodramatic encrustations and get at something like the historical truth. The finished film offers fragmentary evidence of an attempt to show Bligh, not Christian, as the liberal spirit, an ambitious, intelligent, even sensitive representative of the rising middle class, uncomfortably matched with the demands of a position that required an aristocratic blindness to humane concerns. Bligh is seen losing control of self and ship when his men fail to respond to considerate treatment. The situation worsens when he prudishly disapproves of their licentiousness during their months ashore on the sybaritic island, grows desperate as he attempts to reassert harsh discipline once the ship sets sail again.

But this psychological line is inconsistently and unpersuasively developed. As a half-revised character, Bligh is emotionally becalming to the audience; it is hard to know whether to root for or against him, for or against Christian, who is mostly seen hanging about, looking puzzled.

There would have been room, even in two hours, to pursue a coherent examination of these characters in relationship to each other and to the events that transform their lives. This kind of thing, emotions under claustrophobic pressure, is precisely what Director Roger Donaldson, a New Zealander, did well in Smash Palace two years ago. Instead, time is misspent on the allegedly exotic sights, rites and sexuality of the South Seas natives. Toplessness aside, he visualizes them pretty much as directors did in Dorothy Lamour's day. Perhaps he was distracted by the shadows still fitfully visible in this film of the intelligent, unrealized idea with which it began. --By Richard Schickel