Art: An Atom-Powered Thriller

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE CHINA SYNDROME Directed by James Bridges Screenplay by Mike Gray and T.S. Cook, and James Bridges

The China Syndrome is not the least bit fair-minded about nuclear power.

It shows a near disaster at an atomic-powered electrical generating plant located uncomfortably near Los Angeles. The film also depicts the utility company that owns the plant and the contractor that built it resorting to lies, corruption and violence to prevent the public from discovering how narrowly a disaster was averted, how large is the potential for similar incidents in the future -and never mind the sizable body of scientific opinion about the improbability of a chain of accidents anything like that posited by the film.

Still, the picture is wonderfully fair to moviegoers, a superbly suspenseful, expertly crafted, entirely riveting entertainment. It is hard to recall a movie of recent years as absorbing, or as much fun, as The China Syndrome. That rather obscure title, by the way, refers to the theoretical destination of a plant's super-hot uranium core if it somehow lost its liquid coolant and burned through the floor, into the earth and onward to China.

That's what almost happens the day a television news team-Reporter Jane Fonda, Cameraman Michael Douglas -takes a routine tour of a nuclear power plant. They're in the visitors' gallery, looking into the control room presided over by Veteran Engineer Jack Lemmon, when everyone down there starts falling madly about. Some sort of crisis is obviously at hand. Ordered not to shoot.

Douglas sneaks a reel of pictures. But by the time the newshawks get back to the station, the utility's p.r. man has persuaded the news director that nothing really happened. Douglas, a hot-tempered liberaloid activist, smells a conspiracy; Fonda, a careerist, doesn't much care. She's just another pretty face introducing the human-interest stuff. But Douglas persists, the company steps up its villainy, and slowly Fonda's conscience and consciousness begin to stir.

Meantime, something parallel is happening to Technocrat Lemmon. He has always been a believer not only in nuclear power but also in the elaborate Fail-Safe system that makes its peaceful use feasible. Now, however, his superiors push him a little too hard to get the disabled plant back on line faster than he thinks it should be. He also discovers that the contractors who built the plant have falsified vital safety certificates. But even as he's getting on to them, they're getting on to him -no way anyone's going to let fraudulent radiograms be introduced at a certification hearing for their newest nuclear installation. Attempted murder, Lemmon's singlehanded seizure of the plant, with a SWAT team coming through the control-room door and colleagues purposely fouling up the reactor to distract him while Fonda stands by to put his damning evidence on TV live, all follow.

Now that may sound improbably melodramatic, but it plays just fine. The credit belongs in part to Director Bridges for his sure handling of the action and in part to a script that makes us really care for Fonda and Lemmon. It seems almost superfluous to praise Fonda anew, but she is truly at the peak of her talent these days. Nobody has done a better characterization of the vacuity of the TV news "personality" -the little moments of makeup-mirror vanity snatched against deadline pressure, the falseness of on-camera performances that must never really look like performances, the psycho logical confusions of pretending to be a real reporter when you know you've been hired because you've got good bones.

Lemmon, through the sheer integrity of his playing -no cute stuff, no obvious plays for sympathy -is outstanding as an essentially lonely man who has built his life around his dials and gauges, and then learns that they have been programmed from the start to deceive him.

It would have been easy to make a routinely satisfying little thriller out of The China Syndrome, plenty of slam-bang action coupled with a little cheap preachment about atomic perils. But by keeping the polemic almost entirely implicit, by building solid central characterizations into the plot, and by framing the whole thing with quick, shrewd observations (Fonda's career-girl pad, for example, is perfectly disorganized), the movie tran scends its disaster-thriller origins -and its politics. Proponents of nuclear power are right to be concerned about this picture.

A member of the audience might have trouble applying justified skepticism to The China Syndrome's central premise when everything else about the film runs so fast , rings so true .

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