The Best Intentions

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: JACK THE BEAR

DIRECTOR: MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

WRITER: STEVEN ZAILLIAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Filmmakers with sitcom sensibilities aim for sober truth and end up in gloomy muddle.

We are supposed to take John Leary (Danny DeVito) warmly to heart. He has a childlike nature, at its best whimsical and gallant, at its worst careless and a little dim about the relationship between cause and effect. A recent widower, he is doing his best to single-parent two young boys (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr. and Miko Hughes) and to make good in his cute new job (as the comically ghoulish host of midnight horror movies) in a new town (Oakland, California, circa 1972).

Had the people who made this movie been content to develop that situation lightly, they might have made an inconsequential domestic comedy. But they are abustle with larger, if entirely inchoate, ambitions. They have invested John with a real problem -- alcoholism -- and they have plunked the Learys down on a block that is a sort of dumping ground for the damned of the lower middle class. Among their new neighbors are a neo-Nazi, a drug-addict mom who dies of an overdose and someone who keeps a pack of killer Dobermans in the yard next door. For a family teetering on the brink of dysfunction, this environment seems bound to push them over the edge. Sure enough, Dylan, the younger son, is kidnapped and rendered speechless by the trauma.

This crisis is purely arbitrary. So is its eventual resolution. It comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere interesting. But that's the way of this film. The possibly admirable intention is to avoid the false good cheer of the typical family drama. But it has been replaced by the equally false gloominess that often passes for seriousness in Hollywood. Jack the Bear plays as if Maxim Gorky had for some reason been asked to try his hand at a sitcom.

The direction by Marshall Herskovitz, one of the creators of television's thirtysomething, is at least true to the spirit of the script -- at once ponderous and digressive -- but without a clear, clarifying attitude toward it. DeVito's performance is characteristically strenuous, but he is lost -- who wouldn't be? -- among the story's conflicting moods and emotional claims. They should have called it Jack the Unbearable.