The Good Word

By RICHARD CORLISS

REUBEN, REUBEN

Directed by Robert Ellis Miller

Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein

Why are so few substantial novels made into movies these days? Perhaps because the printed page is a dominatrix of the imagination, demanding that the reader conjure up worlds from words, that he become a hard-working co-conspirator in the creative experience. Celluloid, by comparison, is a laissez-faire baby sitter. It asks only that the viewer believe what he sees, that he go with the flow of seductive images and return to intellectual infancy as a passive, pacified fun sucker. The young audience that makes hits these days out of laser shows and locker-room frolics seems bored with the notion that the mind has a life too. And few moviemakers, even the smart ones, are choosing to exercise their craft for the benefit of anyone old enough to vote.

Credit Producer Walter Shenson (The Mouse That Roared, A Hard Day's Night) with putting his money where his mind is. He has shepherded Peter De Vries' 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben from page to screen; he has made a film for, and about, the over-the-hill gang. The central character of Reuben, Reuben is a poet, someone for whom words and even the occasional idea matter. For Gowan Evans McGland (Tom Conti), the English language is a weapon to be used against fools, an aphrodisiac with which to ply faculty wives, and a solace whenever thoughts of suicide dance in his head. Still, words give Gowan problems. His rampant eloquence can prove an embarrassment, as when one avid matron removes her brassiere and Gowan offers this verbal foreplay: "Released from their support, her breasts drooped like hanged men." And for ages now he has been unable to put words into an order that would constitute a publishable poem. As his rueful ex-wife notes, "Gowan always maintained that what he hated most about writing was the paperwork." So from campus to campus he goes, supporting himself on charm, Celtic invective and waiters' tips stolen from restaurant tables.

Enter Geneva Spofford (Kelly McGillis), blond and gorgeous and irresistibly young, half his age and twice as mature. Can Gowan not have realized that women are attracted to the poor childish male more out of pity than passion? Gowan is hooked. His head, the resting place for a dead Siamese cat of hair, is filled with the stirrings of teen love; and his will, which had always moved by shrugs, now be comes a Koren cartoon of shaggy-doggedness. The poet will propose marriage. The nymph will break his heart.

As directed by Robert Ellis Miller, the film ambles along like Gowan, exasperating and endearing by turns. Screenwriter Julius J. Epstein mines De Vries for some daringly "literary" dialogue and fashions a full portrait of Gowan, who was a supporting character in the novel. But Reuben's prize jackanapes is Tom Conti. This delightful English actor (TV's The Norman Conquests) uses all his honed tools--the dimples, the fluty voice, the hermit-crab walk, the little-boy eyes--to steal every scene just by being in it. Petty and poetic, desperate and delightful, Conti's Gowan is the funniest portrayal of a down-on-his-art genius since Alec Guinness's Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth. It is certainly reason enough for a grownup to go back to the movies again.

--By Richard Corliss