FRESH OFF THE BOATLIFT

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A man languishes for 20 years in a cruel dictator's prison. A wife passes that time in exile, faithfully awaiting his return. We know what's supposed to happen when he's released: a period of adjustment (serio or comic, according to taste) and then a triumphant assertion of true love's unconquerable power.

That's life according to the movies and the rest of a pop culture devoted to offering us emotionally reassuring clichas on a weekly basis. (A good current example is My Family, another immigrant saga, in which any seasoned moviegoer can foretell the fate of every character the minute he or she appears, as well as the shamelessly sentimental ending.) But life according to life is usually not so predictable. So, when you run into something like The Perez Family, a movie that is full of lifelike bestartlements but still comes out kind of nice in the end, you have to treasure it.

It's Fidel Castro who sundered the marriage of Juan and Carmela Perez (Alfred Molina and Anjelica Huston). It's the political amnesty and boatlift of 1980 that promises to reunite them. It's another Perez, no relation, who gives them a new life utterly unlike the one they yearned for all those years. Her name is Dottie. She is a hooker-turned-sugar-cane-cutter, and Marisa Tomei plays her, most wonderfully, as a force of nature, a small hurricane gusting along on her own headlong agenda, ripping the roofs off everyone's expectations.

She meets Juan on the boat to Miami, gets mistaken for his wife by an overtaxed immigration officer and decides to exploit the error. Families, it seems, have a better chance of attracting sponsorship-and thus escaping from the refugee camps-than singles do. For good measure, she adds a son (a street kid) and a grandpa (a silent, nutty old guy with a habit of shedding his clothes and climbing trees, hoping to glimpse his lost homeland) to her surrogate brood.

This has a good effect on Juan, whose long incarceration has, understandably, made him depressed and withdrawn. In his condition, as he slowly realizes, he doesn't need or want a simulacrum of his old life back; what he requires is an energizing new deal from a fresh pack. Oddly (and luckily) enough, Carmela is coming to the same conclusion at the same time, propelled by the appearance of a cop (Chazz Palminteri) who starts responding to her wistful, if discreetly displayed, charms as well.

But you can't contain or adequately characterize The Perez Family in a plot summary. For, writer Robin Swicord (Little Women) and director Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala) have crammed their film to bursting with wayward characters and strangely arresting incongruities. Nair has called the movie "an overripe mango," and that's as good a metaphor as any for a juicy, messy, exotic and utterly delicious treat.