Family Values

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He has it all: "creative" job, sensible wife, pretty child, starter home in Metroland, the generic name for London's middle-class suburbia. Chris (Christian Bale) also has something he doesn't need: his best friend from the swinging '60s, a wandering poet named Toni (Lee Ross), who lurches back into his life in the late '70s to taunt and tempt him. The taunts are about the road not taken--abandoned career in photography, abandoned girlfriend (sweet, sexy Elsa Zylberstein) from his years in Paris. The temptation is to return to youthful irresponsibility.

Uh-oh--another wistful study of quiet desperation among the symbol manipulators, another examination of how the anarchic spirit of the '60s got sold out. But this adaptation of Julian Barnes' first novel, by director Philip Saville and screenwriter Adrian Hodges, has some good things going for it. They understand that it isn't politics, Pop Art or drugs that would come permanently to haunt the memories of that brief, lost time for people like Chris. It's the sex, stupid. And the freedom that era offered to pursue it across all sorts of formerly formidable barriers.

There's honesty and energy in the film's flashbacking pursuit of that thought. But Chris' lasting luck is his wife Marion. Emily Watson plays her as a kind of dream nanny--knowing, ironic, tolerant of his erotic nostalgia and not as prim as she looks. She, and Metroland, finally make a good, subtle case for the bearable weightiness of middle-class being, for the higher morality of muddling through.

--By Richard Schickel