Desperately Seeking Starlight

By RICHARD CORLISS

HELP WANTED! PUH-LEEZE! I'm an actress with great refs, awards galore, star quality. Can play comedy or drama, aristocrat or working girl, sweet or sexy, any or all of the above. Critics love me, and moviegoers too. But my career's in neutral. Chewy female roles are hard to come by if your name isn't Meryl Streep. Still, I have lots to offer. What can Hollywood offer me?

Starlight is capricious. Its beam falls on the worthy and the fortunate, then moves restlessly on. In the era of the omnipotent film studios, performers were cushioned by long-term contracts and paternalistic moguls. A career was built through steady work in look-alike roles. But in these free-for-all days, actors -- and especially actresses -- are on their own. They are defined more as artists than as stars; they market their craft, not their luminous personalities. They may win star parts or, on a lark, show up in cameo roles. They may take a year off to work in the theater or have a baby. The easy momentum of the golden age has vanished in an industry where most of the box- office breadwinners are men, and an actress's career rides on an audience's whim. The combustible element used to be star meets star; now it is star finds perfect role. But what if too many good actresses are scrambling for too few good scripts?

Debra Winger, Amy Irving, Rosanna Arquette: moviemakers should be begging to ! snare these actresses for fat and sassy leading roles. No such luck. Irving has for a dozen years commuted easily between stage (Amadeus, The Road to Mecca) and screen (Carrie, Yentl), but movies have rarely caught her witchy allure. Arquette seemed a cinch for stardom after Desperately Seeking Susan, but her elfin sensuality has proved too weird for mainstream fare. As for the wondrous Winger, she anchored three big hits of the early '80s. But after Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment, her career loitered. Nobody saw Mike's Murder; nobody needed to see Legal Eagles. She was outglammed by Theresa Russell in Black Widow and nearly unrecognizable as a hobo angel in Made in Heaven.

What's a gal to do? Take what she can get, work hard and hope. The three new, earnest, off-Hollywood movies from this star-worthy trio -- Irving's Crossing Delancey, Arquette's The Big Blue and Winger's Betrayed -- suggest that when a project has doom scrawled across it, even an incandescent actress can't save the day. If her luck breaks even, maybe she can save herself.

There is no salvation for Irving in Director Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey. The star, playing a Manhattan bookstore manager named Isabelle Grossman, is made to look tired and behave with moral myopia. Can't Isabelle see that the European author (Jeroen Krabbe) who courts her is just one more serpent-eyed wordsmith who would flatter a pretty woman's intellect to soften her resolve? Can't she tell that sweet-souled Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), a pickle salesman from the old neighborhood, is the guy for her? Isabelle's Yiddishe grandma (Reizl Bozyk) can tell, in cliches that fall from her lips like ripe plums.

Susan Sandler's script takes this same Old World view of urban feminism. Isabelle would be emotionally independent, but the movie knows better: she needs a man. Forced to choose between man the European snake and man the American sofa, Isabelle chooses domestic comfort. Crossing Delancey takes Sam's cozy tone too, when it should be screaming its way into black satire. If that's all there is for a modern woman -- or for an actress of Irving's sorceress smarts -- then she might as well curl up in bed with Henry James or Henry Miller and turn out the lights on life.

Daisy Miller, only shriller. That's how European filmmakers have often pictured the American woman. In Luc Besson's The Big Blue, Arquette has to whine, pout, plead, giggle, all to get the attention of an otherworldly deep- ( sea diver (Jean-Marc Barr). But he has eyes only for dolphins and, vagrantly, for his fiercest competitor (Jean Reno). Two men dive to the depths -- and, perhaps, the death -- while she stays behind and paints Barr's apartment. Arquette has always looked like the last wanton of Woodstock, taunting the zippered-up '80s with her lithe carnality. But here she's baggage: the petulant voice of logic in the ear of an innocent sea creature. "I'm here! I'm real! I exist!" she shouts to him, and he dips into the sea like Flipper. Why would an actress go to the Mediterranean to be insulted on film? For a paid vacation, perhaps. But in the midst of this Riviera holiday, Arquette was taken hostage to the bland emotional terrorism of a talented young director in over his head.

One European director, Costa-Gavras, came to America looking for terrorism, and found it. Well, maybe he and Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas invented it, at least in this fulsome form. Betrayed is the story of Cathy Weaver (Winger), an FBI agent sent into the farm belt to investigate an armed conspiracy of the crackpot right. She falls in with, and then in love with, Gary (Tom Berenger), the man of her darkest dreams. For such a paranoid gent, he is pretty quick to accept Cathy. Before you can say "George Lincoln Rockwell," he has invited her to a "coon hunt" -- ten white men having fatal sport with one innocent black. Before you can mutter "Zionist Occupation Government," he has taken her on dates to a paramilitary campground, a bank robbery and a political assassination. (Guess it beats dinner and a movie.) As Gary's angel-face seven-year-old daughter tells Cathy, "One day we're gonna kill all the dirty niggers and Jews, and everything's gonna be neat."

The film's conspiracy theory is neat, for sure. It manages to embody every institution liberals fear -- including the FBI, which keeps sending Cathy back to the bed of the man who would kill her. It makes for a familiar movie dilemma, harking as far back as Notorious (1946) and as recently as Married to the Mob (last week). And when these two loving enemies strike sparks, the picture comes briefly to coherent life. To a tough role, Winger brings all the gifts -- chameleon face, whiskey-and-chocolates voice, hoydenish energy, keen moral intelligence, fierce authenticity -- that make her a pleasure, an adventure, to watch. Pity they are in the service of a schizoid scenario that leaves this splendid actress in the same quandary as her screen sisters Irving % and Arquette: cross, blue, betrayed.