Hollywood's Huck Finns

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

IN THE CLIENT, an 11-year-old boy named Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) must get out of dire straits on his own because his father is long gone and his mother is slatternly and foolish. In Angels in the Outfield, an 11-year-old boy named Roger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is left in a foster home by his feckless father and requires the intervention of a heavenly host to help him. In North, an 11- year-old boy named North (Elijah Wood) becomes so disaffected from his parents that he chooses "free agency" and spends the rest of the picture trying to get other grownups to pick up his contract.

What's going on here? A lost-boy trend? A commercial coincidence, based on such earlier successes with this theme as the Home Alone pictures, Terminator 2 and most of Steven Spielberg's oeuvre? An attempt by sly Hollywood to suggest that the family values it has but recently renewed its oath to uphold and defend are actually missing in much of America? Or -- worst-case scenario -- an effort to subvert those values right in the middle of movies that are marketed and rated as family entertainment?

Possibly none of the above. Or some unlikely combination of them all. In generalizing about movies, it's always best to assume that business is being conducted as usual -- that is to say, with a certain casualness about the moral implications of the products. Hey, got enough worries thinking about the weekend grosses.

On that score, the producers can probably relax about The Client. Of the boys of this summer, Mark Sway is the most interesting. He's a sort of updated Huck Finn. Mark is smart, self-reliant and deeply suspicious of grownups ) -- with good reason, as it turns out. Out in the woods, smoking cigarettes stolen from Mom, he encounters a man in the process of committing suicide. Trying (and failing) to prevent it -- the sequence is good and scary -- Mark learns where a certain very interesting body is buried.

Talk about Huck! This kid is soon up the creek without raft or paddle. The Mafia wants to prevent him from talking about the stiff, and an ambitious, media-mad federal prosecutor (Tommy Lee Jones at his smarmy best) is equally determined to get his testimony. Mark's only ally is a nice lady lawyer (Susan Sarandon), shaky-brave and, since she's lost her own children in an ugly divorce, ready to do a little surrogate mothering.

Director Joel Schumacher has made the most successful movie yet of a John Grisham novel. Its acting is the best, its paranoia and its plotting are fairly plausible and, despite its obligations to thriller conventions, it says something pretty truthful about what it's like to be young and neglected these days. Finally, in Brad Renfro the filmmakers have a real find -- a tough, appealing kid whose instinct is not to beg for sympathy but to let it accrue to him naturally.

This is wisdom not vouchsafed to the creators of Angels in the Outfield, a remake of a dryer, less hungrily sentimental 1952 movie of the same title. A moment before he is abandoned, young Roger asks his father when they might become a family again. "When the Angels win the pennant," the father says. He is talking about the more hopeless of the Los Angeles baseball teams. That night Roger offers up prayers, and seraphim respond. With their help, the Angels start winning. Only Roger can see the small-a angels, and so he is needed to tell the perpetually riled-up manager (Danny Glover) what moves to make when they're present. Thus man and boy are forced to bond. Will the Angels win the pennant? Will the skipper keep his cool? Will Roger find the father figure he needs? If you're asking those questions, you're just the sucker this movie is looking for.

North too is in touch with the supernatural. Wherever he goes, a nameless figure played by Bruce Willis turns up in various guises to help him. Director Rob Reiner strives hard for the tones of a fable, but the result is far from fabulous. There is something smug about North, and about the entire movie. All the substitute parents he interviews are as selfish as North's folks are, and the movie posits a mass movement in which other kids, all spoiled rotten, attempt to emulate North. At least the lost boys in the other movies have authentic problems and they don't suggest, as North does, that American loathsomeness has reached universal proportions.

Good or bad, realistic or fantastic in tone, all these movies reflect a profound unease with the present state of our domestic arrangements. At the end of all of them, their resourceful little heroes are safely clasped to loving bosoms, but in every case the piety seems perfunctory, nowhere near as affecting as the troubles the boys have seen.