Winter Camp

By Frank Rich

MOMENT BY MOMENT Directed and Written by Jane Wagner

Moment by Moment is an awful movie, but it may some day occupy a hallowed place in the pantheon of high camp. This isn't your everyday Hollywood boo-boo; the film is downright perverse. For a couple of hours, two of the screen's best actors, John Travolta and Lily Tomlin, walk around overdecorated rooms and whisper sweet nothings to each other. They have sex in a Jacuzzi full of bubble bath. They build sand castles on a Malibu beach. They fondle cute dogs. They say things like: "I don't even know what the word love means any more" and "I've had it with cheap sex." Is this someone's idea of a big joke?

Maybe, just maybe, it is. Jane Wagner, the film's scenarist and director, has long been one of Tomlin's most able comedy writers. At some point, perhaps, she conceived Moment by Moment as an extended stand-up routine or as a screwball romance along the lines of the old Carole Lombard-William Powell comedy, My Man Godfrey (which is quoted in the film). But the movie's subject, a liaison between a bored Beverly Hills matron and a younger man, is too provocative to be entirely laughed away. Wagner deals with this dilemma by switching her tone from scene to scene, almost always without warning. Embarrassingly enough, the sentimental moments are far funnier than Wagner's wisecracks about Southern California mores. The suds are soon indistinguishable from the froth, 'and Moment by Moment be comes a tidal wave of inanity.

The big loser in the ensuing chaos is Tomlin. As written by Wagner, the film's heroine is defined more by brand names (Gucci, Mercedes, Perrier) than emotions or intellect. There are only silly plot devices to motivate her on-again, off-again affair with the street-kid hero, Strip. Tom lin has so little to work with that she falls back on fey comic mannerisms and, finally, phony swoons and sighs. It is the first time that this usually empathetic actress has stood completely outside the character she is playing. Instead of creating a latter-day version of Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson, she comes across like a somnambulant Elaine May.

Since Travolta's lines, however drippy, are all written to be read sincerely, he escapes Moment by Moment alive. He works powerfully hard to make Strip vulnerable and compassionate: watching him, one can imagine how the film might have dealt seriously with the issues it raises about men and women. Travolta alone, of course, cannot save the movie, but it is reassuring to know that there is at least one professional onscreen.

Whether Travolta is enough to pull in huge audiences this time around is an open question: next to this film, Grease starts to look like Citizen Kane. He appears fairly often in his Saturday Night Fever bikini briefs, but Moment by Moment's sexual drift is more than a little ambiguous. When Tomlin touches his body, she does so in the clinical manner of a doctor probing for telltale lumps.

When Travolta joins her in bed, he seems to be making love to a mirror image of himself. There is no erotic chemistry whatever, but the romantic trysts do reinforce the guiding spirit behind the movie. For those who toil in the never-never land of camp, heterosexuality is still the biggest joke of all.

--Frank Rich

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