Punishing The Dream

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: CONSENTING ADULTS

DIRECTOR: ALAN J. PAKULA

WRITER: MATTHEW CHAPMAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Folderol in the suburbs makes for a wildly implausible but highly moral tale.

YUPPIES IN PERIL. AGAIN. THIS time it's Richard and Priscilla Parker (Kevin ; Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) who are lured away from their narrow suburban patterns of getting and spending, both financial and sexual. The seducer is their next-door neighbor, Eddy Otis (Kevin Spacey), abetted by his wife Kay (Rebecca Miller). First Eddy masterminds an insurance scam to help the Parkers out of credit-card debt. Next he encourages a spot of highly improbable wife swapping. Can violent crimes -- and false accusations leveled at poor, increasingly bedeviled Richard -- be far behind?

At this late, possibly terminal, date in the history of this genre, why ask? Of course Richard will be taught a chastening lesson. These movies, despite their voyeuristic promises, are essentially moral tracts. They instruct us that he or she who aspires to unearned material and erotic goodies will be punished, that happiness lies in perfect fidelity to one's mate and to hard, honest careerism. See enough of them and you begin to think Dan Quayle owes Hollywood an apology -- and that Michael Medved might consider cooling his jets.

On the other hand, somebody owes us an apology for the relentless portentousness of Consenting Adults. Kay's seduction of Richard verges on a Mae West parody, while his response to it has something of Stan Laurel about it. And once a capital crime occurs, the sheer complication of its planning and its solution is too implausible. Alan J. Pakula's direction consists largely of pullbacks and pans that never reveal anything interesting -- except, perhaps, his own misguided ambitions for a film whose one real hope was briskness and irony, a sense that this subject is fully ripened for satire.