Into The Realm of Sigh-Fi

By RICHARD CORLISS

REGARDING HENRY Directed by Mike Nichols; Screenplay by Jeffrey Abrams

Nobody has a life anymore, Hollywood tells us, only an afterlife. By now you are familiar with all those transcendental rehab movies -- Ghost and its spectrally sentimental cousins -- in which people return from the void to get a chance to say (What else?) "I love you." Audiences lose themselves in a teary mixture of awe and awww at these wistful fantasies, which now constitute an entire genre: sigh-fi.

Regarding Henry, Mike Nichols' effective, infuriating new weepie, works a cunning variation on the born-again theme. It eliminates the middleman, Death, by subjecting Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) to a gunshot wound that erases his memory. Bang!, you're a new man. The old one needed some revision. That Henry was a slick Manhattan lawyer who misused his gifts to ruin innocent men and save venal corporations. Instructed by his chic wife (Annette Bening) to apologize to their 11-year-old daughter (Mikki Allen), Henry instead scolds the dear girl in Latin. The guy barely deserves to live, until he gets a chance to do it right, from scratch.

After his injury, Henry must be taught everything over again, from how to walk to who he is. Ford, whose face assumes the agreeable befuddlement of Mortimer Snerd, plays Henry as an eager but slightly backward child. He returns to his posh Fifth Avenue apartment as if he had been consigned to a foster home. But because his teachers are kind and patient, he becomes a new man and determines to right the wrongs he committed in his earlier life. He is like a reformed Scrooge on a very long Christmas Day. He will buy his daughter a puppy and even become that most improbable creature, an honest lawyer.

This is, recall, a fantasy, set in the old-fashioned movie Manhattan that is a beautiful place to be lost in. Nichols, as always, is terrific at suggesting worlds without words. The camera catches a glance from a pretty lawyer at Henry's firm, and we know in that instant that she has had an affair with the old, nasty Henry. But then the script insists that these epiphanies be spelled out in illuminated capital letters; and Nichols, a jaunty yachtsman of a director, must trawl through treacle. Strings swell at the merest emotion. And -- lordy! -- dog-reaction shots! By the end, when the pooch trots into a school chapel, you may want the animal to pee on a pew.

$ We bet that the picture will be a hit -- not because it is so smart about many small things but because it is so shameless in promoting its one big thing. Like the other sigh-fi movies, Regarding Henry says any mortal catastrophe offers an opportunity to erase the chalkboard mess we have made of our lives. We can make amends and have great sex too. By serving up comfy antidotes to illness and death, these movies provide a seductively meretricious form of release: New Age religion on the cheap. How like Hollywood to insist that the slogging drama of most people's lives is mere fodder for a better, more glamorous sequel.