The Patter of Little Footes 1918

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sit by me, child, and we'll leaf through the family album. Why, there's Brother, standing outside the picture show where he spent so much time, and smoking a cigarette. Thought he was a big man, though he was only 17, and got into a man's worth of foolishness. Cute, though. All the girls said he looked just like Bobby Harron. You don't remember Bobby Harron? No, he'd be before your time. Oh, look, there's Lizzie with her little daughter Jenny. Poor Jenny, she got carried away in the flu epidemic of 1918. It killed more people than the Great War, didn't you know that? Nearly brought Lizzie's husband Horace to his knees. That's Horace there, out in front of his clothing store, and a fine, gentle man he was. Why, I remember when Horace . . . What did you say, child, you're sleepy? Well you just curl up here while I go through the old photographs. Lovely days, sad days. So many memories, child. But no matter . . .

1918 passes the moviegoer's time in this fashion. You enter its world as you would the Robedaux family home in Harrison, Texas. Through the lazy air swirl names familiar to everyone but you, bits of gossip about people you may never meet. You will feel like an intruder unless you accept this film on its own stringent terms: as a home-movie reverie about people who are cordial but not awfully forthcoming. They were here long before you came; they will continue, at their own measured gait, long after you leave. Life is like that too --every human relationship demands inferences based on insufficient evidence--but movies rarely are. Which is why 1918 has the effect of a 91- minute convalescence from the electroshock therapy of current Hollywood filmmaking.

The picture is not without incident. As World War I flickers through the Texas consciousness in newsreels and letters from the front, the people of Harrison wage a losing battle against influenza. Horace Robedaux (William Converse-Roberts), a clothier who fell in love with a well-to-do girl, is anxious about being sent to the war; he sees conscription as desertion of his wife Lizzie (Hallie Foote), his infant daughter and the baby on the way. While Lizzie's winsome wastrel of a brother (Matthew Broderick) gets into trouble with gambling debts and a pregnant girlfriend, Horace falls victim to the flu. There is a death in the family, and a birth. In Harrison, though, life's scars are hidden under high collars and good manners. If these folks keep their thoughts to themselves, it is partly because they are too genteel to scream.

The film's tone and style are similarly discreet. 1918 alludes rather than displays; at times it just sits there like a good deed. Occasionally, it will burst into dramatic feeling, as in Horace's bout of delirium, a wonderfully judged piece of writing and acting. But then characters will lose their edges in the diffused light that seeps through the windows like radiation and gives the picture its instant-nostalgia look. Important lines of dialogue will be muffled by heavy footsteps or a piano's plaint. The crucial event of the Robedaux family occurs offscreen, in a narrative caesura between the film's two "acts." Watching this film is like going on a diet: it is probably healthy for you but not very nourishing.

Most of the passion attending 1918 was spent in getting the story on film. This is a family movie in every sense of the term. The writer is Horton Foote (Tender Mercies), who based his script on incidents in his parents' lives in Wharton, Texas. Foote's wife was one of the film's producers; his son worked as an actor, casting director and production assistant; the bed in which Horace ails belonged to Foote's parents; the baby born at film's end is most likely the author. And the leading lady is Foote's daughter Hallie. A vanity showcase? Hardly, for she has a fine, nonactorish face and conveys absolute emotional authority, balancing the heft of each gesture, the weight of every spoken or unspoken word. She is the one beckoning presence in this private family world.