Private Eye Full of Wry

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BIG FIX

Directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan; Screenplay by Roger L. Simon

Moses Wine is a sometime Berkeley activist and law school dropout, now beginning a new life and career as a Los Angeles private detective. He drives an unprepossessing yellow Volkswagen convertible and often has to take his two kids along when he's on a stakeout--his ex-wife being much preoccupied with her est-like training and her live-in, est-like trainer. The rest of his family consists of an aunt who once waltzed with Bakunin in Russia, and is too busy to be much help with the kids: she's trying to radicalize her senior citizens' center and attempting to keep Moses ideologically pure in materialistic America. Harassed by the contradictory demands of profession, middle-class responsibilities, nostalgia for old political ideals and the desire for a comfortable upper-bohemian style of life (not to mention a broken arm, for which he invents colorfully violent explanations as the occasion demands), Moses finds temporary resolutions to his conflicts in wisecracks, pretended cynicism and continual bustle.

As portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss, Moses Wine is a character of rare vintage. Indeed, it's not too much to say that he is the best, most entertaining figure anyone has managed to invent for an American movie this year. Moses not only is an amusing variant on the classic lonely guy, private-eye character, but Screenwriter Simon, adapting his own novel, also employs him for purposes of wry and rueful social observation. The well-plotted mystery tale quite compassionately reveals how a lot of '60s radicals have signed on with the System that was once thought to be their enemy, and are uneasily but profitably doing all right as a result.

Moses is hired by the manager of a gubernatorial campaign to discover who is trying to smear his man by linking him with a once notorious campus radical leader now thought to be living underground. The trail the detective pursues brings him into contact with chicano activists, former-radical lawyers, Mob hit men, old movement stars who are still in jail for their activities, ominous Government agents and, finally, big right-wing wealth.

The plot also leads him into a very dark passage when the young woman (Susan Anspach) who helped recruit him for the job--and who was his once and, he hoped, future lover--is murdered because she is a witness to a key kidnaping. But the emotion this event releases in Moses gives the film an honest weight that is not burdensome or pretentious. At this midpoint, the production becomes serious without turning sober and without slackening its strong pace.

If there is any fault to be found with The Big Fix, it lies in the fact that the former radicals the detective turns up are leading lives rather too close to the center of present-day action. However attractive the purloined-letter (or plain-sight) theory of hiding the object everyone seeks, a viewer may doubt that once famed politicals could work without being recognized in positions as prominent as the ones Moses finds them in.

Yet such is the charm of Moses Wine, and the curiosity of those he encounters in his search, that one does not feel like complaining too heartily about this matter, especially when Dreyfuss and the rest of the cast play so well, and Director Kagan finds so much that is pungent and fresh in that most overused of movie locations, Los Angeles.

In the end, what director and actor create is a subtly satirical yet never vicious tone that has a delicacy not often found in American films. They can mock the excesses (of behavior and expectations) of a radicalism past while retaining a decent respect for its just social criticisms and youthful idealism. At the same time they can note the inertness of a massively materialistic society without be coming shrill and off-putting about it. In short, there is a welcome and unexpected maturity of outlook in this little film that is extraordinarily attractive no matter where you happened to stand during the '60s or how you feel about the way things are going in the '70s. Above all, it provides the most agreeable moviegoing experience in months.

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