Of Hotels, Hoods and a Mermaid

By Richard Shickl, R.S., RICHARD CORLISS, R.C.

Four new films, but only a finny romance is a hit

SPLASH

It is axiomatic: if a man falls in love with a mythical creature in a movie, the result is bound to be a gagging spoonful of whimsy. All credit, then, to Splash for having a mermaid capable of turning her fins into shapely gams flop up on Manhattan's in salubrious shores, where a quick education in paranoia, cynicism and the perils of materialism has ever been available to out-of-towners. For from that unpromising situation emerges a romantic comedy that is as salty and bracing as a plunge in the surf. Whenever Daryl Hannah, as the sweetly shallow creature from the deep, and Tom Hanks, as the produce merchant who loves her, start to get goopy, there is a New York City street person available to assert the reality principle: Eugene Levy, splendid as a mad scientist who seems to have wandered in from a Jaws sequel, or John Candy, fine as a man who thinks Penthouse centerfolds are philosophical statements.

Before Director Ron Howard and his gargle of writers (Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman) arrange a satisfactorily romantic ending for their odd couple, they also manage to satirize everything from presidential politics to daytime television. They are a jostling, busily observant, funda mentally good-natured crew, and audiences are well advised to take a plunge on Splash. -- By Richard Schickel

AGAINST ALL ODDS

Against All Odds is one of those remakes that inexplicably leave out everything that was interesting and memorable in the original in order to concentrate on the conventional and the routine. Eric Hughes' screenplay is based on Out of the Past, which may be the most deliriously convoluted film noir ever made, and the new picture retains the clockwork heart of the 1947 Robert Mitchum movie: a gangster hires an investigator to find the woman who has run away from him; when hunter and hunted meet and fall in love, the hood suffers a criminal loss of temper. But it has misplaced the suffering romantic soul of its model, which ex pressed itself through narration and dialogue that recollected tacky things past in tough, cynically charged metaphors and through images as shadowed as an ambiguous memory. It was all rather as if Philip Marlowe had decided to stake out his suspect disguised as Marcel Proust.

Director Taylor Hackford, who did An Officer and a Gentle man, has banished darkness from his remake and told memory to take a hike. He works in a relentlessly sun-drenched present, and his central figures (Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward and James Woods) are used as symbols, not of the past's sweet cheats but of tedious corruption and the lost paradise of Los Angeles. The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark, who stalked many a stylish mean street in better movie days. Their participation is both a pleasure and a curse. Simply by lending their veteran gifts to this retread, they remind us that progress is not Holly wood's most important product. --R.S.

THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE

One can almost hear this eager whisper down the corridors of Orion Pictures: "The Hotel New Hampshire could be the Tom Jones of the American '80s." Same director (Tony Richardson), same teeming fresco of endearing eccentrics, same Rabelaisian appetite for sex as the main course in the banquet of life, same giddy mixture of the farcical and the funereal, same pilfering of every silent-comedy trick from fast-motion camerabatics to actors who step out of character to wink knowingly at the audience.

Big difference, though. The domestic surrealism of John Irving's novel, a sort of tragicomic You Can't Take It with You, surrenders to the discipline of cinema narrative only after a struggle. His characters operate on obsession and whim ("I'm a grizzly bear!" "I've got to have sex with my sister!" "Hey, kids, let's all move to Vienna!") as the labyrinthine logic of Fate gives way to an author's caprice. On this Wild Mouse ride of moods and motives, Life goes on, Death comes in, windows open, options close. Try making a movie out of that.

Richardson, who also wrote the screen play, has tried his hardest to be both free and faithful to the story, and with considerably more brio than was displayed in the lamentable screen adaptation of Irving's previous book, the wondrous The World According to Garp. As in the synopsis-defying novel, the Berry family muddles through the mismanagement of a bunch of hotels, half a dozen dalliances and more than any family's rightful share of abrupt deaths. Trouble is, both the film and the characters are as preposterously buoyant as the giant balloon animals in a Thanksgiving Day parade. They rarely touch the earth, which makes it hard for them to touch a moviegoer's heart.

From among the large cast, many recruited from the New York stage, kudos goes to: Jodie Foster, sensibly raunchy as the eldest Berry child; Rob Lowe, as her brother, who registers the dreamy horniness of adolescence; Lisa Banes as the most tolerant of mothers in a patriarchal family; and Jennie Dundas as Lilly, the half-pint-size author for whom life is just too short. These attractive actors often come close to embodying Irving's mes sage: the adhesives of blood and affection can help even a weird family stick together like Velcro. --By Richard Corliss

MIKE'S MURDER

Most "overnight stars" have a few skeletons in their closets: low-budget movies made when they were struggling for attention, then exhumed by some fringe distributor trying to cash in on a brand name. Mike's Murder, which stars Debra Winger as a bank teller lured into the paranoia of the cocaine underworld, is a skeleton in a super-closet: the picture was made in 1982 between Winger's two big hits, An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment, and was perpetrated by James Bridges, the writer-director whose previous films include The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy. The pedigree of Mike's Murder matters not; this picture is a dog.

Bridges must have spent a lot of time recently watching bad French movies. Every cliche of existential anomie -- the aimless driving, the heavy smoking, the elliptical dialogue, the motel-room angst -- has been imported to the seedier suburbs of Los Angeles. Saddest of all is the use to which Winger, who shares laurels with Sissy Spacek as the most affecting and natural of Hollywood's bright young actresses, has been put. Forced to play a woman with no past and little presence, who is part blah and part blase, Winger discards her quirky charms to walk through the movie like a puzzled zombie. Did she do Mike's Murder as a favor to Bridges, who in Urban Cowboy gave Winger her first meaty role? It looks more like penance. -- R.C.