TOXIC LOVE

By RICHARD CORLISS

They love each other, the Hekes do. When big handsome Jake (Temuera Morrison) and his wife Beth (Rena Owen) sing the blissful ballad Here Is My Heart, all their friends can see heat crackling between them. But 18 years and five children, and the frustrations of living on the dole in Auckland, New Zealand, leave their scars. So do Jake's fists. When too much liquor primes the rage within him, he will punch Beth and fling her against the far kitchen wall.

This is a fatal, familiar tale. Why then has Once Were Warriors become New Zealand's all-time homemade hit and the vanquisher of Jurassic Park at the nation's box office? Partly because director Lee Tamahori's film shows why people who hurt each other still stay together-for love, oh, toxic love. But Warriors, written by Riwia Brown from a controversial novel by Alan Duff, also has the lure of ethnographic exoticism: Jake and Beth, their kids and friends are Maori, members of New Zealand's indigenous people.

Once they were warriors, indeed, and fought the British to a standstill. Today, in the city slums, Maori males are dispossessed chieftains whose search for manhood leads them to modern variations on tribal traditions. The film is a social tragedy, observed in love and pain. It's also a study of class animosities within a race. Beth was a princess of the Tainui tribe, and the elders disapproved of her marriage to Jake, who comes from "a long line of slaves."

Morrison has a hulking charm that makes one root against hope for Jake's regeneration. That, of course, would be to deny the movie's trajectory toward emotional wipeout. By the end, Once Were Warriors has left an ache in your heart, a hole in your gut.