Look-Alike

By Frank Rich

VOICES

Directed by Robert Markowitz

Screenplay by John Herzfeld

Whatever one thinks of Rocky, it has not had a salutary effect on the movie business. The film made America safe for modest, old-fashioned tearjerkers, and Hollywood opened the floodgates. Voices is the latest in a chain of look-alike films. Even in this shoddy barrel of bathos, Voices is near the bottom.

John Herzfeld's screenplay concerns Drew Rothman (Michael Ontkean of Slap Shot), a Jewish delivery boy in Hoboken, N.J., and Rosemarie Lemon (Amy Irving of The Fury), a deaf teacher who wins the hero's heart. Drew wants to be a singer, Rosemarie wants to be a dancer, and they both want to be in love. There are obstacles along the path to a happy ending. Rosemarie's stern mom (Viveca Lindfors) feels that deaf people should stick to their own kind. Drew must act as keeper for both his gambling dad (Alex Rocco) and his ne'er-do-well kid brother (Barry Miller). Meanwhile, agents are not breaking down the doors to offer the young lovers performing contracts.

It is difficult to believe this story or to care about it. Although Drew and Rose marie are adults, their relationship is founded on nothing but abject puppy love. Their careers are scarcely more interesting than their emotions. Drew aspires only to be a middle-of-the-road pop star along the lines of Barry Manilow. Rosemarie is not so much a ballerina as a fledgling Broadway chorus girl. Were this team to make it, they would still never amount to much more than the Captain and Tennille.

Though every plot point is established roughly three times, Herzfeld's script is riddled with holes. He asks us to believe that Drew would record a make-or-break audition song in a coin-operated "Record-O-Graph" booth, without musical accompaniment, just because his cassette machine was broken. Later the hero lands a star gig at a disco by sheer happenstance.

The dialogue is full of howlers, including a number of lines inexplicably built around meat imagery. At times Voices sounds like the first half of the Larry Gel bart-Sheldon Keller satirical script for Movie Movie--played straight.

Robert Markowitz's direction, which puts great stock in mushy dissolves, is slightly below the level of a TV perfume commercial. Whenever the action trails off, he brings on a Jimmy Webb theme song that sounds like a cross between You Light Up My Life and I Will Wait for You from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Stars Irving and Ontkean can be vibrant actors, but Markowitz straitjackets them into cutie-pie poses. If Irving comes off the better of the two, it is because of her character's affliction. Somehow silly dialogue does not seem quite so embarrassing when it is relayed in sign language.

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