Don't Put Your Drama Onscreen

By RICHARD CORLISS

Let the mid-cult trumpets be raised: Hollywood is stagestruck again. Children of a Lesser God corrals five Oscar nominations; Crimes of the Heart blossoms into a modest, megastar success; Brighton Beach Memoirs and 'night, Mother find their way to film. All of which means . . . very little. Perhaps that there is lower financial risk in stories with few characters and no special effects. Or that the ravenous appetite of the home-video market can be easily stoked with product that has proved its value in another venue. Or that moguls have decided to bankroll a few films with their wives in mind instead of their kids.

This trend too shall pass, as Hollywood rediscovers the dangerous differences between an art built on artifice and one that tilts toward realism. The theater's delicate conspiracy of pretense and believability can betray the most faithful filmmakers. In close-up, gestures become italicized, speeches sound like sermons, and a powerful actor can look like a ham going over the top. You can spot these fatal flaws in three plays just landing on the big screen. The sound they make is thud.

84 Charing Cross Road, which played the West End and Broadway a few years ago, began as Helene Hanff's 1970 memoir of her 20-year mail-order affair with the London bookseller Marks & Co. Hanff, an aspiring Manhattan writer, never met Frank Doel, the antiquarian across the sea, yet their business correspondence about old books gradually took on the intimacy of love letters about literature. She described, with chatty eloquence, her sensuous safari through the world of words; he tracked down her requests with a consort's fond diligence.

This kind of material works best uncinematized -- a radio play with its own gentle celluloid night-light. But Screenwriter Hugh Whitemore and Director David Jones have thrown in trips to Central Park, vignettes of the Doels doing house chores. And Anne Bancroft has provided Helene, a native of Pennsylvania, with a Noo Yawk accent that rasps on the ear. She hurls apostrophes to the walls and abuse at her typewriter. One sighs: Relax, Anne, you got the job. As Frank, though, Anthony Hopkins gets the job done. With shrewd understatement, he fills out the portrait of a man who demands much of himself but expects little from life. If the viewer expects little from 84 Charing Cross Road, he will not be disappointed.

Like Frank Doel, Stephanie Anderson in Duet for One has the plucky, soldiering-on English temperament. Beneath it, however, is a violin virtuoso's rage at being felled by multiple sclerosis. The role, played on Broadway by Bancroft, now extracts one of Julie Andrews' strongest performances. Fighting the disease and its accompanying despair, stoking her own infidelity and her husband's, displaying the terminal patient's luxury of being both noble and bitter, Andrews transforms Tom Kempinski's case history into a metaphor for middle age. Stephanie could be any careerist facing a mid-life crisis of confidence -- Is she at her peak or past it? -- or the cripple any woman feels herself to be when her man goes randying after younger bodies and more pliant hearts. Andrews doesn't tear a passion to tatters; she uses it to stitch a coherent soul.

All else is a shambles. The director, Andrei Konchalovsky, has an unique gift for bringing out the worst in good actors. Alan Bates, as Stephanie's composer husband, looks goofy in a Beethoven haircut; Star Pupil Rupert Everett rants and sniffles; Macha Meril, as the Italian maid, provides her own subtitles in moments of distress ("Aiuto! Help!"). And finally the movie exonerates all the rats in Stephanie's life. She sees them happy and united and goes off to die by her favorite tree. Duet for One died long before.

And that was the good news. Of this trio of movie plays, Beyond Therapy brings the most severe disappointment because it held the most promise. Christopher Durang's 1981 play was a deft and rancid parody of psychobabble. The comely cast includes Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, Glenda Jackson, Tom Conti and Christopher Guest. Robert Altman is an estimable director poised for comeback. He even had an idea about opening up the action: by setting this postromantic comedy more or less simultaneously in Manhattan, with its memory of Philip Barry penthouse sophistication, and Paris, locale of many a clockwork farce about the sexual duplicity of the middle class.

But just everything goes wrong. Durang's sharpest dialogue is buried under layers of ambient sound. Scenes are diced until they lose all comic momentum. The cast moves like clubfooted puppets; they would be more fun if they had been photographed watching the Weather Channel. Beyond Therapy also suffers from something like pestilential bad timing. It is, after all, the story of a bisexual guy waffling between his mistress and his male lover. Durang, who has made wondrous mock of such sacred institutions as Roman Catholicism, child rearing and the Hollywood musical, might have considered confronting the last taboo by updating his satire to the Age of AIDS. But no. The play has come to the screen inert and toxic, a poisonous time capsule.