From Heartland to Heartthrobs

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Drama, music and comedy rub shoulders in three fall films

How're ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the fall crop of farm movies? In one of those bewildering flurries of consensus that occasionally lead Hollywood toward artificial revivals of old genres (Remember the passel of westerns in 1980?), three major studios have produced a trio of films on the same unfashionable subject: Don't sell the farm, Mother! Disney's Country, like Tri-Star's Places in the Heart and Universal's forthcoming The River, tells the story of a strong-willed woman who fights the banks, the elements and the changing times to keep her God-given patch of land safe for her and her adorable kids.

Standing beside the gentle poetry of Places in the Heart, Country looks as stubborn and haunted as a dirt farmer caught in Dorothea Lange's lens. This is an unashamedly political film, spoiling to pin responsibility for the small, independent farmer's troubled times on the shrugging shoulders of the Reagan Administration. However majestic Jewell Ivy (Jessica Lange), her husband Gil (Sam Shepard) and their teen-age son Carlisle (Levi L. Knebel) may appear in profile against the Iowa sky, they are still vulnerable to being devoured in the tractor tracks of bureaucracy. And Gil, a defiant homesteader who can't take maybe for an answer, is in danger of losing his family and his self-respect when he realizes the enormity of his predicament.

Until a climax too calculated to stir the emotions, Screenwriter William D Wittliff and Director Richard Pearce navigate a careful, dogged course between tract and treacle. In this near-miss movie Shepard is once again the icon of incorruptibility who refuses to claim the center of a film. Toward the end of Country Shepard's character disappears, with little explanation, in what may be a gentlemanly bow to Jessica Lange, a flinty, landsomely wasted matriarch. Mother ones, meet Ma Joad. --By Richard Corliss

BIZET'S CARMEN

Ever since French Novelist Prosper Merimee locked a lustful Navarrese soldier and a lubricious Spanish gypsy in fatal embrace, Don Jose and his Carmen have danced their deadly Habanera through ligh art and mass culture. Although burdened with a sanitized libretto, Composer Georges Bizet transformed Merimee's cautionary tale into a supercharged epic of erotic obsession that has become a fecund source of material for generations of movie directors. Cinematic treatments have run the gamut from Charlie Chaplin's burlesque Carmen (1916) to the soft-porn Carmen, Baby (1967). The past year alone has seen radical film versions by Peter Brook, Carlos Saura and Jean-Luc Godard.

Carmen's latest incarnation, starring Spanish-born Tenor Placido Domingo and American Soprano Julia Migenes-Johnson, for once plays the opera straight.

Shot on location in Spain by Italian Director Francesco Rosi and adapted by Rosi and Tonino Guerra, the film boasts some striking images: cigarette girls hike their skirts while suggestively rolling tobacco on their thighs, and smugglers carouse in taverns of dubious salubrity.

At 43, Domingo is the world's oldest corporal, and although he sings passionately, he wears the look of a man who has swallowed a very hot chili. Migenes-Johnson, of Puerto Rican and Greek descent, is an exotic beauty, but her voice is inappropriately bland, and for all her enthusiastic writhing, she emerges as less the femmefatale than a one-night stand gone wrong. Bizet's potent mixture of blood, sand and song needs fire in the belly, as well as in the loins. --By Michael Walsh

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

Adorable nine-year-old takes viciously squabbling parents to court, sues them both for a divorce. In today's Hollywood this is known as a "high concept." What the phrase really means is that the concept is so low it can be summarized and sold on the basis of one simple sentence. But inside Irreconcilable Differences' concept (in which the child's court action functions as a framing device for a story told in flashbacks) there lurks an acute, sobering comedy that has as much to say about the price of success as it does about the costs of marriage `a la mode.

Albert Brodsky (Ryan O'Neal) and Lucy Van Patten (Shelley Long) "meet cute," in the traditional manner of romantic comedies. He is a film scholar hitchhiking to a job at UCLA. She's an aspiring writer who picks Albert up and marries him four days later. Little Casey (played by Drew Barrymore when she reaches dialogue age) and the career moves quickly follow. The film is at its knowing, uncynical best as it observes Albert parlaying his knowledge of movie trivia into a career as an authentic au-teur--especially of his own misery. Lucy, the girl he leaves behind, runs first to despairing fat, then to her typewriter. There she produces a bestselling novel about their wrecked marriage just in time to buy his mansion from him as he hits the skids after producing a Civil War musical starring his latest "discovery."

O'Neal is, as ever, good at earnest befuddlement; Long is marvelously febrile in both misery and triumph. Screenwriters Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer (who here makes his directorial debut) appear to have been up and down and to have learned that both are bad news; they also display a familiarity with the life and films of Peter Bogdanovich. Only in their reach for a reconciling ending do they betray the cool ferocity of their approach. They may love old movies as much as their protagonist does, but they should know that, for good or ill, Frank Capra has retired. --By Richard Schickel