Wasted

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN

Directed by Karel Reisz

Screenplay by Judith Rascoe and Robert Stone

Based on Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone's dark and ambitious novel of four years ago, this is a well-made, soberly intended film. It contains some dialogue and situations that have more ironic wit than one expects to find in an essentially depressed, and depressing, context. The trouble is that the movie deals predictably with an ugly milieu (drug dealing) and with characters whom one cannot, in the end, even pity.

What we have here is an ex-Marine (Nick Nolte), tough to the point of psychopathy, agreeing to smuggle out of Viet Nam and into the U.S. a large stash of smack for his old buddy (Michael Moriarty), who is both feckless and luckless. The stuff is supposed to be dropped on the latter's wife (Tuesday Weld), who is a prescription-drug doper. A corrupt narcotics agent (Anthony Zerbe, at his meanest) and a couple of ex-cons who alternately provide comic and sadistic relief want to rip off the junk. All this leads to a chase that covers much of the southwestern U.S., which is naturally visualized entirely as a wasteland.

Therein, of course, lies the point. What Stone was saying in his novel was that a trashy culture, America in the '60s, produced precisely the trashy counterculture it deserved, and also the trashy, unromantic criminal life it might have expected. Even if one could not entirely accept his relentlessly bleak view of contemporary life, there was a certain symbolic weight to Stone's characters, a naturalistic force and detail in his writing that carried the reader along, however glumly. The movie strips most of that texture away in order to concentrate on the action. The result is a succession of classic genre confrontations carried out by dispirited people, movement without brio or suspense. With all the violent interruptions, it is hard to take the characters seriously. But, since so much of their behavior carries a socially deterministic message, we also can't relax into the mindlessly pleasurable state that a good crime story can induce. We are caught in annoying limbo, made more vexing by the picture's occasional flashes of satirical intelligence (a brief descent into the chic drug culture of Beverly Hills, the hard cynicism of Zerbe and his associates). Finally, Who'll Stop the Rain is just another ambitious downer, a wasted effort to make something meaningful out of wasted lives. --Richard Schickel

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