Part-Time All-American

By RICHARD CORLISS

Talk about having it all. Jessica Lange is juggling three golden balls: a life with playwright-actor Sam Shepard, status as a celebrity supermom (two children by Shepard, one by Mikhail Baryshnikov) and, when she can make time, movie stardom. Is Lange's part-time job as exemplary actress a hobby, as football is for Bo Jackson? If so, it can be no less punishing or rewarding, because Lange -- any actress, really, in today's Streepstakes -- must find the core of feminism, of flinty self-fulfillment, in a modern movie role. No wimpering-wife parts, thank you. Just Joan of Arc in Levi's, with Silkwood strength and Flo-Jo flash.

Two new films show Lange playing by these implicit rules while bending them to suit. In Far North, she is Kate, a Manhattan careerist come home to Minnesota. Kate is a little addled, but less so than most of her relatives, and she possesses a loyalty to the whims of her dotty dad that is fierce enough to pass for independence. In Everybody's All-American she is Babs Rogers Grey, Louisiana U.'s Magnolia Queen of 1956, who blossoms into a principled businesswoman even as her marriage to a college football star withers like a corsage she forgot to press into her yearbook. Within the hash marks of familiar sports drama, the picture aims to be a Southern-fried epic, and Lange nudges Babs toward that goal. She is Scarlett O'Hara who almost becomes Maggie the Cat -- until, in the '80s, she ends up so strong and nurturing she could be a Lear's cover girl.

Lange only inhabits her films; she doesn't write or direct them. Shepard assumed those two tasks in Far North and distinguished himself in neither. The plot is as old as Antigone, the emotional temperature as wintry as Ingmar Bergman's, the conflict as scabrous as any Eugene O'Neill family flaying. And yet the movie unravels as if it were an anguished parody of Shepard's own play A Lie of the Mind. He lured Lange and a cast of fine actors to Duluth, then stranded them on a back road halfway between Hysteria and Catatonia. Virtually every character is either deranged or noisome. The big debate is over which daughter loves Dad (Charles Durning) more: Kate, who insists on shooting the family horse, or Rita (Tess Harper), who wants to save it. The film should have been put out of its misery long before. They shoot movies, don't they? Yes, but few so spectacularly egregious as this one.

Don't go Far North. Instead, consider heading south for Everybody's All- American, directed by Taylor Hackford and written by Tom Rickman from Frank Deford's novel. At least you will discover that Louisianans have more fun being miserable, and accomplish it in suaver style, than Minnesotans do. This is the movie that asks, Is there life after the Sugar Bowl? Jan. 1, 1957: that's when Gavin Grey (Dennis Quaid) soldered his legend to his destiny by scoring his team's winning touchdown.

How sweet it is to have just one such moment in life. How bitter to have it early, and then be forced to rerun it ad nauseam, until the triumph turns into sitcom. Bitter for Gavin, for the luminous Babs, for their bookworm nephew Donnie (Timothy Hutton) and their lumbering pal Lawrence (John Goodman). The story meanders through 25 years of the changing South -- civil rights, women's rights, the capricious kingdom of celebrity -- and ends in 1981, but its moral should catch in many a yuppie throat. The price of pursuing eternal youth is catching it, like a cold you can never shake. Especially for the eternally adolescent male. Games, after all, are what men play with themselves.

Movies have trod this turf once or twice before; the mid-'50s were rife with such sprawling family sagas (Giant, Written on the Wind). And it might seem as if such broad emotions, such guileless ironies, have no place in our blandly cynical age. But Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) strides easily among movie cliches. His gift is to play them as if they're all new and all true. And this time he has a cast to lend them flesh and nuance. Quaid creates a genuine pathetic hero, first exuding charm, then marketing it. And Hutton, in the thankless role of Gavin's conscience and Babs' would-be lover, makes his clammy patience and docile come-ons darned near authentic.

As the one character who grows and doesn't just calcify, Lange brings wily zest to each step in Babs' coming-out party. She can toss dewy-eyed soul into a line like "I just want to be Mrs. Gavin Grey" -- all ardor, no condescension. She can bear, with a smoldering fuse, the later ordeal of player's wife and baby factory. She can tease Donnie while ironizing her flirtation: "It's every Southern mama's legacy to her daughter." She can seize control of her own life and still stand by her man. Gavin may have embodied, as the film suggests, "everything that the South wanted to believe about itself." But as she matures in this role, Lange comes close to embodying everything a modern woman hopes to see in the mirror of her hard- earned self-esteem.