Losing Big

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

UNDER FIRE

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode

Screenplay by Ron Shelton

and Clayton Frohman

A freelance photographer is covering a revolutionary war in the Third World. Among his many expectations of discomfort, danger and the constant threat of death, he dares harbor only one decent hope: that in some unlikely 250th or 500th of a second his shutter will open and shut and almost by accident freeze an image that will make some human sense out of the anguish to which he is the world's paid witness.

A post-Hemingway adventurer like Russel Price (Nick Nolte) does not, of course, permit himself to articulate such aspiring thoughts. With his thick voice, his beefy former jock's build and his wary-passive manner, Nolte plays Price (very authentically) as a man who is all reflexes of the single-lens variety. The big picture in Nicaragua, as the Somoza regime yields to the Sandinistas in 1979, means little to Price, who is portrayed as being on assignment for TIME; he is more concerned with the succession of little moneymakers he must try to capture as they flee past his view finder. It is the business of the film lo arrange a not entirely persuasive series of events that shatter Price's illusions about the power of objectivity to defend itself when political passion is afire. The rebels want him to fake a picture that will aid their cause; the government points him toward their secret base, hoping some of his other pictures will help it identify the state's enemies.

To its credit, Under Fire does advance sensible arguments for letting history, not the correspondents on the scene, judge the ultimate meaning and morality of political events. Bui ironically it is Ihe senseless death of the newsman who expresses these sentiments (Gene Hackman in a well-judged performance, not too cynical, not too idealistic) that turns Price into a Sandinista sympathizer. He takes with him into the rebel camp the newswoman both men love. And since Joanna Cassidy brings such attractive intelligence to her role, one's first impulse is to accept without protest Ihe film's ambiguous climax.

But Under Fire is as duplicitous as it is busy. It has been sneaking in this direction from the beginning, showing all government figures as almost comically dumb and decadent, all rebels as rather decent sorts. One wishes it would state its sympathies openly, and perhaps allow Price lo assert his craftsman's integrity and his disgust with everybody who wants lo turn his camera into a deadly weapon. Bui that assertion requires an ability lo make fine judgments and take a long view that no one, except the actors, has brought to the enterprise. Without a sufficient measure of authority, Under Fire ends up as a movie too pleased with its own intellectual bravado.

--By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.