Such Fun Singing the Blahs

By RICHARD CORLISS

It is the worst of times; it is the best of times. Britain and its film industry are mired in an economic funk, and sympathetic Englishmen like Filmmaker John Boorman (The Emerald Forest) are detecting a "national malaise" in which "all our actions are punitive. We are intent on punishing one another, exacting penance." This flagellation is most evident in a trio of new British films. The wave of ironic celebrations of the imperial past (Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown on TV) has ebbed, and on the shore we find the carcass of a small, irrelevant nation, reflected in the films of its sharpest young minds.

And here is the wonderful twist. Britain's dramatic artists have often found their strength in cataloging their kingdom's weaknesses. Now a new generation is raising its collective voice to sing the blahs. This familiar tune was heard in the late 1970s in stage and television drama; it took only a few years for graduates of those media to make their mark in film. Three provocative examples from this year's crop: Wetherby, written and directed by David Hare of the BBC and the National Theater; Dance with a Stranger, written by Playwright Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey) and directed by Mike Newell, who has worked in British and American TV; and Insignificance, directed by Nicolas Roeg from a play and screenplay by Terry Johnson. All three films are ferociously critical of Britain or its thunder-stealing ally, the U.S. All are set (at least in part) in the 1950s, when postimperial Britain shrank into the Brave New Nothing-very-much-thank-you. All have, ironically, reinvigorated British cinema and helped restore it to world-power status.

Wetherby revives an ancient pleasure: the need to think while watching a movie. One could almost be back in the 1960s, when films like Last Year at Marienbad demanded to be approached like cryptic crosswords. For upwards of two hours we stretch our intellects to find the key to Wetherby's emotional life. The film's characters do not easily yield to analysis, though they are surely worth the bother. Their stiff upper lips are pursed in ruminative silence. And when they speak, they have something to say; Wetherby is a devilishly clever talk show. Moreover, they inhabit a film that commutes briskly through three time zones in one Yorkshire village--the present, the recent past and 1953--the better to study the evidence and, perhaps, baffle the audience. European in form, English in its turbid psychological climate, the film could have been called Last Year at Weatherbad.

A quiet young man named John Morgan (Tim McInnerny) is a surprise guest at a dinner party whose host is Wetherby's favorite schoolteacher, Jean Travers (Vanessa Redgrave). He strikes a spark somewhere inside Jean's loneliness. The next day he stops by, chats a bit, then puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains across her kitchen wall. The shock of this scene, which sends horror-show gasps through a movie house of jaded adults, also blasts the story back to 1953, dramatizing the abortive affair that the teenage Jean (played by Redgrave's daughter Joely Richardson) had with a young airman off to his death in Malaya. Two erotic encounters in 30 years, two gruesome deaths. A track record like that would put a crimp in anyone's social life.

Wetherby owes equal allegiance to the anguished conundrums of Ingmar Bergman and to the 1967 Harold Pinter film Accident, another story of academics in rural England, a young man who dies violently and his mysterious death-magnet of a girlfriend. It can even be seen as an upscale soap opera, in which a decent spinster finally stumbles into a mature, equitable relationship with the local policeman. But Hare is after much more: the composite portrait of middle-class England, a community in which an affable exterior hides sexual crimes behind the privet hedge. The casting coup of Redgrave mere et fille pays handsome dividends: Vanessa, ever luminous, her face a substructure of sinew and stress waiting to implode, and Joely, with much of her mother's beauty and most of her shy mannerisms in embryo. They bring body and soul to a tantalizing entertainment.

Miranda Richardson, the leading lady of Dance with a Stranger, is no relative of Joely's, but she handsomely fills her star-is-born role as Ruth Ellis, the London nightclub hostess who in 1955 murdered her boyfriend and became the last woman executed in Britain. Coiffed and coutured in the Marilyn Monroe fashion, Richardson shrieks her way through Ruth's sordid life with coloratura bravura. "I love you," murmurs David Blakely (Rupert Everett), a spoiled, sodden rich boy with a passion for racing cars and a taste for tarts. "Everybody does," Ruth shrugs. "Why should you be different?" An older man, Desmond Cussen (Ian Holm), is Ruth's pal and protector, the one dour celibate in this tatty Sodom. Des is used to being used by Ruth; it is his way of feeling needed. He has the patience for her; David has the hots. Together, these qualities might make a decent lover. Opposed, they tear Ruth apart.

Ruth is a woman both of her time and out of it. Like a 1950s moll, she indulges men's fantasies of the blond bombshell; like an '80s woman, she is spikily determined to come to them on her own terms. This sexy, witty film has the texture of a '50s B movie: these are small, doomed people viewed unsentimentally as they take their sport in cramped bedrooms or walk along soot-swathed streets with murder in their eyes. Though Richardson has the showstopper part, Holm is the class act here. With his finicky mustache and sad, knowing eyes, he poignantly deadpans Des' coaled passion for Ruth. Des alone knows what her obsession with David will lead to. Ever the decorous Englishman, he is powerless to stop it.

Men's perfervid expectations drove Ruth to murder, Marilyn to fatal overdose. Metaphorically, both women "die of intimate exposure," to quote a character in Insignificance known only as the Actress (Theresa Russell) but plainly meant to represent Monroe. The other three main characters find real-life correlatives just as easily. Indeed, the plot could be synopsized as follows: What if Albert Einstein (Michael Emil) were threatened in his hotel room by Senator Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis), then visited by Marilyn Monroe, who explains the theory of relativity to its creator, then interrupted by Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), who wants a divorce or maybe just a little attention?

Here is America at the apogee of its influence--in science, politics, sports and sexuality--and what a sorry mess it makes. Though the cast is all-American, the writer and director are British, and they have divided their quartet of superstars into hero-victims (Einstein and Monroe) and ham-fisted villains (McCarthy and, foolishly, DiMaggio). As this goofy, madly ambitious film sees it, though, all four eminences carry a heavy burden. While the mass of mankind looks on from its refuge in oblivion, celebrities must somehow be "significant" for all of us, must take responsibility for changing the world or illuminating it or ending it. From the 1950s to today, the U.S. has been cast in that role. And Britain, relieved of the job, watches her overgrown kid brother from the sidelines, and takes copious notes, and makes films.

So Britain's film artists turn the worst of times into something like the best of times, with their searing vision of a nation still troubled in its sleep by dreams of old glory. Wrote John Boorman of his ailing film industry: "There must be a record number of nails in this coffin, yet the corpse is still screaming to be let out." Goaded by David Hare and his caustic compatriots, British cinema may yet dance on its own grave. --By Richard Corliss