Three's Company

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NEW YORK STORIES

Directed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Woody Allen; Screenplays

by Richard Price, Francis Coppola and Sofia Coppola, Woody Allen

Invidious comparisons being the curse of the creative class (and the perverse joy of the critical community), the first thing one must say to Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Woody Allen is "Brave lads!"

They have each contributed a short film to New York Stories, probably , knowing as they signed their contracts that their work, when combined, would not be judged for its total effect, which is delightful, but scored like some unlikely Olympic event. One imagines reviewers grouped around the pool, holding up flash cards (9.5, 7.0 or whatever) as these men, possibly the best American directors of their generation, paddle back up to the surface after their plunge into the unfamiliar depths of the anthology film.

The dive into the short-movie form is highly difficult, especially when confronted from the platform of a lofty reputation. It requires the same concentration of effort and narrative skills needed for a full-length feature but, without the distractions of spectacle or subplot, makes flaws more obvious. In these circumstances, Scorsese and Allen have a natural advantage. Their core following is not big enough to support the grand movie gesture, and they have learned the art of compression that seems to bore, if not actually depress, their ever thrashing colleague.

Scorsese is hardly a highly verbal filmmaker. His gift is to pack the equivalent of a thousand words of dialogue into a single elegant image. Life Lessons is about a bearish artist (Nick Nolte) whose reputation is currently bullish in chic circles but is distinctly on the decline as far as his lover assistant (Rosanna Arquette) is concerned. Both actors are excellent, as is Richard Price's script, which is taken from a passage in Dostoyevsky's life. But it is from the observation of simple things -- a slo-mo close-up of a cigarette being discarded, a brush slathering gobs of paint on a canvas -- and from the way he establishes the counterrhythms of artistic creation and emotional destruction that Scorsese sidles slyly up to the highest truths of his tale.

Allen's method is different. In Oedipus Wrecks, his efficiency is that of the perfectly practiced anecdotalist, not wasting a moment on irrelevant detail, yet knowing when to linger over the important ones. In this brisk vignette, Allen himself plays Sheldon, victim of a kind of transcendental Jewish-mother joke. It would spoil the fun to say how he transforms a stock figure, a yammering, smothering mom (Mae Questel, who is splendid), from a private torment into a public menace, but it is literally magical to behold.

Coppola's Life Without Zoe, a sort of Eloise story set at the Sherry Netherland Hotel instead of the Plaza, is the weakest entry. It occasionally says something mildly amusing about the overprivileged children of New York & City's rich and famous. But Coppola and his co-writer, who happens to be his 17-year-old daughter Sofia, cannot settle on a tone for their overplotted yarn of a Junior Ms. Fixit, working simultaneously on the cases of a poor little rich boy and her parents' wavering marriage. The Coppola team tries satire and sentiment, but the story is not so much concluded as abandoned in a muddled rush. Give it a 5.5, and be grateful for the 10.0s on either side of it.