WHEN ART REDEEMS LIFE

By RICHARD CORLISS

STARDOM CAN OFFER AIRTIGHT INsulation from reality. From the fact that he is famous, a celebrity too often creates the fiction that he is revered. O.J. Simpson, for instance, translated an acquittal verdict by 12 jurors into the claim that most Americans really believe he's innocent. And Woody Allen, who three years ago was show biz's most notorious middle-age male, keeps making movies whose plots reflect, excuse and promote his lustlorn escapades. Both guys are fallen idols who have trouble understanding what all the fuss was about. They want America to take an amnesia pill so they can get back to their work: being loved in public.

We don't for a moment equate capital crimes with romantic misdemeanors. Still, there's something icky in Allen's compulsion to write scripts about fiftysomething guys ready to dump their wives for nubile waifs the approximate age of Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. This is the plot of Allen's 1992 Husbands and Wives, of his brutally funny playlet in the off-Broadway Death Defying Acts, and of his exasperating, finally engaging new film, Mighty Aphrodite.

Here he's Lenny Weinrib, a sportswriter with a pretty, peckish wife (Helena Bonham Carter) and, to his joy, a five-year-old adopted son Max. Curious about the boy's lineage, Lenny finds Max's natural mom, Linda (Mira Sorvino), a prostitute who also does porn work. How can this lost soul, with her Vargas body and "state-of-the-art fellatrics," be the wellspring of a brilliant child? Lenny must save this creature, for Max and from herself. His anguished pursuit of Linda, in which he tries mating her with a dim boxer (Michael Rapaport), is tracked by a Greek chorus that's all singing, all dancing and so Yiddish you could plotz. "I see catastrophe," one chorus member darkly intones. "Worse--I see lawyers."

More perilous still, we see Allen re-writing his tabloid sins at an age (he'll be 60 this year) when he looks like a pensive Rumpelstiltskin; boyish roguery ill suits him. In TV revivals of Broadway farces, he plays crabby geezers: the tourist with tsuris in Don't Drink the Water, a decrepit comic in a new version of The Sunshine Boys. Yet in his films Allen is the Woody of old--or, rather, of young. To Lenny, the raw, vibrant Linda makes Amanda seem stale and shrewish. Bonham Carter (who's a radiant 29 and certainly doesn't look shrewish) must play that standard Woody marplot, the older woman. Sure, Linda's got the screwball charm of the early Judy Holliday, but does every Allen superbabe have to be born yesterday?

And can't Amanda be more than a grab bag of weaknesses? Poor trite thing: she's bored by Lenny's name games and love play. She insists on adopting a child, then all but ignores him. ("I'm the boss," Lenny insists to Max. "Mommy's only the decision maker.") And she cheats on Lenny before he can on her. Her dalliance is a betrayal; his is a quest. Once again Allen's take on marriage is biased and bleak; he sees it as a prison for two, where the condemned may finally rise to a level of reciprocal pity. They achieve awareness by admitting defeat.

Fortunately, Allen eventually dumps the wife stuff to concentrate on one of his classic characters: Linda, whom Sorvino wonderfully incarnates with a weenie voice and a brassy poignancy. The distracting visual trope of Allen's last few movies--that virtually every scene, no matter how long, must be filmed in one shot with a very fidgety camera--pays off in the first meeting of Lenny and Linda; the comic tension is deliciously built and sustained. And when the chorus breaks into some dreamy Cole Porter harmonies as background to an unlikely amour, the goofiness is almost magical.

The suspicion lingers that Woody Allen deserves a good spanking, and not from a prostitute with a heart of gold. But, listen: humor and sentiment can triumph over stern morality any day. Once the picture gets going, it reminds us that Allen is also an artist with an acute feel for movie romance. So scruples be damned. This time, Mighty makes all righty.