Lost In Ambition

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: NEIL SIMON'S LOST IN YONKERS

DIRECTOR: MARTHA COOLIDGE

WRITER: NEIL SIMON

THE BOTTOM LINE: An airless adaptation of a hit play overexposes its flaws.

One mean mother (Irene Worth); her 36-year-old daughter (Mercedes Ruehl), ! whom the mother has contrived to keep in a state of childish dependency; and a rebel son (Richard Dreyfuss), who has become a gangster: confine just these three most colorful members of the Kurnitz family in a small space (the apartment above Mom's candy store in Yonkers, circa 1942), and claustrophobia begins to itch at one's soul. Add a couple of lively boys, Jay and Arty (Brad Stoll and Mike Damus), forced by circumstances to live with Grandma for the worst part of a year. All are damaged in less than amusing ways, and after a couple of hours it begins to feel as if they've pumped all the air out of the theater.

Neil Simon's adaptation of his Pulitzer prizewinning play is, as one might expect, entirely respectful of the original (his boldest creative stroke is working his own name into the movie's title). Director Coolidge, who did a fine job with another eccentric family in Rambling Rose, moves quite gracefully within the confines of a piece only minimally "opened up" for the screen. Ruehl has two poignant arias announcing her realization of what her mother has done to her. Dreyfuss spritzes high-spirited resentment, and Worth's steely old woman, determined not to show softness to anyone, is a powerful presence. Such suspense as the film displays derives from the question of whether someone, somehow can crack her open.

Nevertheless, for all its professionalism and occasional felicities, you suspect that Lost in Yonkers worked better on the stage. One generally wants to maintain a certain distance from dysfunction; you don't want it leaping across the footlights to land, falsely grinning, falsely ingratiating, in your lap. But it is, of course, precisely the camera's business to facilitate such leaps. Even so, if these people had any real charm, if their oddity were cloaked in wit, if their rather chilly creator brought some real compassion to these sealed-off lives, we might take them more readily to heart. If they suggested some generalized insights about lower-middle-class life, we might more readily forgive their dreary excesses. And if wishing could make it so, Neil Simon would be Anton Chekov's authentic, instead of his merely aspiring, heir. Which would make this a much better world to live in.