Psychology Lesson

RIVALS

Directed by KRISHNA SHAH

Screenplay by KRISHNA SHAH

This movie could pass nicely for an orientation film to be shown at a psychoanalysts' convention. A study of Oedipal torments in upper-middle-class Manhattan, it is so scrupulous about establishing psychological explanations for each turn of the plot that even the most casual viewer may feel compelled to jot down a few notes.

Jaimie (Scott Jacoby) is a ten-year-old kid with a chart-shattering IQ who nurtures a selfish affection for his mother and yearns for his deceased father, a TIME editor who had always wanted to write a novel. Jaimie's mother Christine (Joan Hackett) makes quite a nice living, thank you, running a small gallery on Madison Avenue. She and Jaimie are great chums until she meets a whimsical New York tour guide named Peter Simon (Robert Klein). Peter woos her by parking his Volkswagen bus on a wharf and regaling her with tales of his childhood, his parents and his aborted career in the Peace Corps. Soon they are wed, to the considerable distress of Jaimie, who begins to wage acts of astonishingly clever psychological warfare.

Interlarded with the bouts between stepfather and stepson are a variety of clumsily contrived flashbacks covering every conceivable area of Jaimie's early development, from parental arguments to toilet training. None of this succeeds in making the hysterically melodramatic conclusions any more convincing. There are, for all this, good performances by Hackett and Jacoby, and a couple of nice, edgy encounters between Jaimie and Peter, most notably one in which they meet for the first time. "Please don't tell me I'm old for my age," Jaimie wearily replies to a bit of elementary flattery. Peter tries for a fast recovery: "All right, as long as you don't tell me I'm young for mine." Jaimie looks at him with almost ducal contempt and replies, "That's obvious." With more of that kind of kinetic tension and a great deal less clinical dramaturgy, Rivals might have made a good movie.

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