GAS PAINS

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ever since Jodie Foster faced off against Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Hollywood has been in love with the image of imperiled Good staring down incarcerated Evil. Just Cause, Copycat and Dead Man Walking all exploit a dramatic tension that is both elemental and cost-efficient; it requires only a bare room and an actor able to summon some malefic grandeur.

The Chamber, John Grisham's 1994 novel about a young lawyer trying to save his racist murderer of a grandfather from being gassed by the state of Mississippi, has at its heart such a confrontation. The book's 676 pages tease with the tactics of time-bomb suspense, notably in the figure of a hovering assassin who threatens grandfather Sam with a family bloodbath if he reveals that the assassin was guilty of the crime for which Sam is to be executed. But The Chamber is really a tale of love and forgiveness, a suturing of wounds across three generations.

In the film version, directed by James Foley (At Close Range), Gene Hackman plays Sam as a scrawny, withered rooster, with tobacco stains on his teeth and hatred of blacks and Jews in his heart. He has an alcoholic daughter (a skeletal Faye Dunaway) and a grandson, Adam (chipper Chris O'Donnell), determined to save Sam from state-sanctioned murder. This makes for high, disjointed drama--a shotgun marriage of Method theatrics and TV-movie heart tugging.

To give the film the old Grisham urgency, scripters William Goldman and Chris Reese add a pretty black woman (Lela Rochon) as Adam's helper, a conspiracy of old white guys, and an assassin who gets his due. All this proves is that the filmmakers couldn't trust in the potency of two good actors bringing life to a chat on death row.

--By Richard Corliss