JESUS CHRIST, SUPERDUDE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The cliche used to be that if Christ came back to earth in modern times, he would be either actively scorned or passively ignored by a population lost to materialism. That, of course, was before the talk shows and tabloids began directing the spiritual lives of simple, yearning souls. Nowadays, in his innocence, a Christ figure would be ripe for cheezoid exploitation.

Unless he has adapted to the new era, as has the one who calls himself Juvenal in writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's Touch. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts to drift out of the rehab center where he has taken refuge.

Among his would-be exploiters are a sometime revivalist (Christopher Walken), now reduced to selling used RVs and aluminum siding; a Catholic fundamentalist (Tom Arnold), prepared to enforce a return to the Latin Mass, at gunpoint if necessary; a dubious record promoter (Paul Mazursky), worried that Juvenal won't tour as the Pope does; a star biographer (Janeane Garofalo), looking for the inside gossip; and, of course, a TV host (Gina Gershon), half smarm, half snarl.

They're all good characters, well cast and well played, and the fun of the movie is watching the scuzzballs unravel when they are confronted by serene, possibly divine, innocence. In Juvenal's case this quality is gently armored by Bridget Fonda's sweetly sexy representation of common American sense and decency. She is supposed to seduce Juvenal on behalf of the siding salesman, but she knows a good man when she sees one, in part because they so rarely traverse the moral flatlands she has been obliged to inhabit. She also knows she had better treasure and protect this one without dithering too long over the matter. Goodness is ever an endangered species--and evil is ever a dangerous one.

Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead. Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But Touch was never meant to be Get Shorty. It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective.

--By Richard Schickel