A Not So Cracked Nut

By Martha Duffy

With its innocent story and the grand emotional pull of its Tchaikovsky score, The Nutcracker is one children's entertainment that rarely fails to work magic: every expectation aroused by the music is abundantly satisfied by the dreamlike cogency of the fantasy onstage.

This week the fable will reach the big screen. Warner Bros. is releasing a major film of George Balanchine's classic 1954 production, performed entirely by New York City Ballet dancers; children from the company's crack training ground, the School of American Ballet; and starring none other than former student Macaulay Culkin, who settled for $10,000 (he recently made an $8 million deal with MGM) so that he could play the nutcracker prince.

Several appealing versions of The Nutcracker exist on film or videotape. An especially familiar one is the American Ballet Theatre's 1977 production, a TV holiday staple starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland, both in their radiant prime. But Balanchine's remains the standard. His hero and heroine are children, and the first act contains a party scene that is the heart of the piece. Deftly and smoothly, it teaches a timeless lesson in deportment: how a child's natural greed and anger are coaxed into poise and good manners.

At this bourgeois Christmas Eve gathering, social dancing -- the children and their parents together -- fosters this gentle civilizing process. Later the young protagonist Marie (Jessica Lynn Cohen) has a dream touched off by her naughty kid brother Fritz, who breaks her favorite new toy, a nutcracker. The dream starts as a nightmare: the family's Christmas tree grows to alarming proportions; huge mice scuttle threateningly around her until they are conquered by a newly potent nutcracker (Culkin), who is then transformed into an angelic, pink-suited prince. Thereafter the dream becomes a cotton-candy fantasy as the prince escorts Marie to the Kingdom of the Sweets, where waves of dancers, led by the Sugarplum Fairy (Darci Kistler), perform in the children's honor. In a hilarious mock-grandiose conclusion, the pair depart, ascending to the snowy heavens in a reindeer-drawn sleigh.

Played annually at New York City's Lincoln Center, Balanchine's ballet is a classic, a casting-proof sellout that generations of children have grown up on. (After a year or two, they become members of the boisterous Nutcracker fraternity who ritually applaud the prince's victories, always at the same plot points.) The movie should have been a triumph, but somehow it falls short. Not because of the performances, which are fine. Culkin appears a little too camera-wise performing among relative amateurs, but he is an effective prince. Kistler dances with the tender grace of a fairy princess. Kyra Nichols leaps through the role of Dewdrop like a cavorting sprite. In the Marzipan Shepherdess's exacting solo -- full of exposed pointe work -- Margaret Tracey looks like a particularly toothsome sweet and dances impeccably.

Add to these highlights the buoyant work of the children, and what could go that wrong? Well, the lighting and the camera work. Director Emile Ardolino's palette is inexplicably dark and shot so dizzily that the dancing is often hard to follow. Much of the party scene is a murky jumble. To help clarify things, the filmmakers added a last-minute narration by Kevin Kline. From a purist's viewpoint, Kit Culkin, Macaulay's demanding father and manager, was correct when he argued noisily that this intrusion into Balanchine's concept should be excised. When he lost out, he retaliated by withdrawing his son's participation in promoting the film. Kit has a right to his opinion; after all, he played the prince in 1958. But the truth is that the voice-over is helpful to anyone who has not seen the stage version and is probably vital for small kids.

Just as puzzling is the jerky photography. Dance is the last place to try anything but stable, even conventional, camera work. Ardolino, who died last week, directed Dirty Dancing as well as several parts of the PBS Dance in America series. He has shown that he can shoot his camera straight -- and in fairness it should be pointed out that at least he does not cut off the dancers' feet, a common Hollywood error. But in the long Kingdom of the Sweets sequence, the action is blurry. The Waltz of the Flowers, with its swift pace and swirling, swooping movements, almost falls apart. The choreographic patterns are unreadable, and even Nichols' brilliant dancing loses some of its definition.

In the end this visual failure breaks the spell and blunts the ballet's appeal. The best solutions to filming dance were worked out in 1930s musicals. It's hard to fly to dreamland if you have to keep deciphering the signals. Fred Astaire -- who insisted on clarity above all else -- would groan.