Up-Country Without a Paddle Volunteers

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"It's not that I can't help these people," says Lawrence Bourne III as he steps off the plane in sunny Thailand one day in 1962. "It's just that I don't want to."

Lawrence (Tom Hanks) can perhaps be excused his momentary petulance. After all, he has been forced to borrow his roommate's identity and Peace Corps credentials and flee Far Eastward to escape gambling debts on the very night of his Yale graduation. Why, he is still wearing his dinner jacket. His first seatmate on the flight has been "Tom Tuttle from Tacoma" (John Candy), who reads books about maximizing his potential capital-wise and is the most egregious go-getter since Babbitt. His next is Beth Wexler (Rita Wilson), who rejects a night and a day of advances, to Lawrence's immense puzzlement ("I do think I've put in the hours, don't you?"). The rest of this ship of idealists bellows away the time with endless choruses of '60s sing-along favorites like Puff the Magic Dragon.

No, one would not say that Lawrence and the Peace Corps were made for each other. Still, if one is far up-country without a paddle, there is a lot to be said for the kind of unfazable aplomb that only generations of inherited wealth and socially impeccable inbreeding can produce. Tom is captured and brainwashed by the local guerrillas in a test of wills that ends in a draw, with Tom reciting Chairman Mao's aphorisms (they sound like the text of a self-help book to him), his tormentors marching into battle singing the Washington State fight song (which sounds martial to them). Beth is abducted by a mad CIA operative and offered as harem material to the nearest warlord- opium smuggler-defender of democracy. But Lawrence has time to save Tom's soul and Beth's body, open a nightclub, direct the hearts and minds of the natives as they build a bridge they do not need and teach them how to play New England baseball ("It's straight poker, but deuces are wild for white men"). He even has the wit and gumption to prevent his new span from being captured by convergent, divergent armies.

Hanks has devised a snooty accent (he sounds as if he were born with a silver potato in his mouth) and a way of likably parodying almost Ayn Randian selfishness. Candy again shows that he is a resourceful character comedian. Wilson neatly captures the priggish whine of middle-class idealism and its potential for redemption through experience and common sense. Each reflects the controlling intelligence of the film's writers and director, who want to celebrate the antic resourcefulness of American individualism while satirizing the gaseous platitudes that are too often used to motivate and justify it and sometimes corrupt it. Their work may have the broad manner (and the marketing strategy) of a teen pic, but do not be misled. One has to have lived through the early '60s to appreciate what a good, smart comedy Volunteers is.