Larger Than Life

By RICHARD CORLISS

You can bank on this: Milos Forman will never make a movie called The Milos Forman Story. Though the plot is dramatic enough -- early renown in his native Czechoslovakia, exile in cultural limbo, the struggle of starting over in a new land with a new language -- the climax does not ring true. It is too improbable: a smash hit and Oscars galore for his second American film, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), more profits and honors with last year's Amadeus. Sorry, pal. Send the script to Sly Stallone.

Now consider these plots. A wily misfit takes on the mind benders in an Oregon psychiatric hospital (Cuckoo's Nest). Hippies raise their voices, and a little hell, against the Viet Nam War (Hair, 1979). A black man is driven by righteousness to lead an armed revolt against white America (Ragtime, 1981). A great but graceless composer battles the musical establishment of Old Vienna (Amadeus). In Forman's American films an irascible individualist is forever butting his head against the walls of official power and getting bashed for his pains. These parables of dreams defeated hold echoes of tales from Forman's compatriots in dark absurdity, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard. They are hardly the stuff of Hollywood dreams.

Yet much about Forman and his films mirrors the spirit of America. Like any true Hollywood director, he works on the grand scale, in broad, confident strokes. Energy, not nuance, informs every frame. And like any true immigrant with a success story, Forman is grateful to his adoptive country. "For me," he says, "there was only one place to go if I couldn't live in my own country: America. It is a country of immigrants. There is such a tolerance for the foreign and the unfamiliar. America continues to amaze me."

Born 53 years ago, in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, Forman was already a significant cinema voice before his arrival in the U.S. He had helped unleash the Czech new wave of the 1960s with a trio of wry social comedies: Black Peter, Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball. But in 1968 the Prague Spring ended abruptly to the rumble of Soviet tanks, and shortly thereafter Forman went to New York City to shoot his first American film, the gentle, generation-gap comedy Taking Off. "I've never been political," he insists, "not in Czechoslovakia, not in this country. But after the commercial failure of Taking Off, I didn't have money to take a plane home, so I asked the Czech government if they'd bring me back. And they fired me." Sacked by an entire country! There was nothing to do but start from scratch in the U.S.

Fortunately, Forman had studied his new subject, America and its movies, like a scholar lover. "I knew America by way of the films I'd seen growing up," he recalls. "I had a kind of mythical vision of the country, a movie vision, larger than life. But then, so many things about America are larger than life that it was a more accurate vision about things than you might think." Forman's early years in New York City gave him glimpses of New World generosity ("The manager at the Chelsea Hotel was very relaxed about the rent") and mendacity. "In America," he says expansively, "there's room for lots of dishonesty in the film business."

Now Forman, who became an American citizen in 1977, lives on a 39-acre farm in Connecticut. After 16 years of courting and being courted by Hollywood, the filmmaker is still a fan. "I admire the vitality and variety of American films," he says. "Where else do you get a Star Wars, a Places in the Heart and a Stranger Than Paradise?" Though still married to an actress who remained in Czechoslovakia with their two sons, Forman is now an American moviemaker with few regrets. "I certainly don't think my art has suffered from my being in Hollywood," he declares. "I am doing the kind of films I always wanted to do." In Caslav or Culver City, that's called a happy ending.

With reporting by Alexandra Tuttle/Cannes