Running (Barely) on Empty

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Julia Roberts is fragile and determined as a law student too smart for her own good. Denzel Washington is foxy and stalwart as the reporter who wants to break the story of murderous high-level corruption she has pieced together for a research paper she calls The Pelican Brief.

It is never totally disagreeable to spend time in the company of such attractive people. And every once in a while Robert Culp appears as an addled, detached President of the United States, provoking wicked, recognizing laughter. Within living memory, the Oval Office has sheltered such a figure.

But that pretty much completes the short list of pleasures afforded by writer-director Alan Pakula's adaptation of John Grisham's gazillion-copy best seller. Mostly this is a movie about people getting in and out of cars, which either do or do not blow up when they turn on the ignition. They also talk on the phone quite a bit, usually in darkly lighted rooms, to callers who are not entirely forthcoming in their messages. From time to time, they are chased by nameless people who are boringly expert at dealing out sudden death.

These are, of course, the efficient, familiar ligatures of thriller plotting. They can be comforting when you're page-turning your paperback in economy class and all you're looking for is a gentle diversion. Movies, though, require something more than connective tissue, however handsomely rendered. They are a dramatic form, which implies a need for both ever tightening menace and, ultimately, direct confrontations with evil's source. Or, failing that, some colorful characters.

The adaptation, earlier this year, of Grisham's The Firm eventually took Tom Cruise's running man into the presence of his chief tormentors. But Roberts' running woman gets to confront only a few members of the supporting cast, all of whom -- Culp aside -- are drably written and impossible even for actors as good as Hume Cronyn, John Lithgow and John Heard to sink a fang into. And we never get to see, even in the shadows that are a Pakula specialty, Mr. Big -- who has ordered the assassination of two Supreme Court Justices.

Pakula, who has proved his ability to turn paranoid suspicions into scary reality (Klute, All the President's Men), gives his movie the dark glow we have come to expect from this genre. But we don't go to movies like this in search of stylish apercus. We go to see innocents like ourselves getting swept up by irresistible tides of terror. And to have the pants scared off us. That doesn't happen in The Pelican Brief. An airplane read has been turned into nothing more compelling than an airplane see.