Restoration

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

AGATHA

Directed by Michael Apted Screenplay by Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft

Ostensibly, Agatha is a fiction that attempts to fill in the lacunae in the historical record of one of this century's least pressing but most fascinating enigmas: that ten-day period in 1926 when Agatha Christie, that shy and eminently respectable mystery writer, seemed to disappear off the face of the earth, becoming the object of a very noisy hue and cry in England before she was found, volunteering (as she never did) no explanation for the only untoward incident in her otherwise gray tweed life. Actually, the true subjects of this movie, based on a story by Co-Scenarist Tynan, are cloche hats, potted palms, brass-and wood-fitted motorcars and, above all, the manners, styles and quaint equipment to be found a half-century ago in an expensive health spa like the one where Christie went to ground. These Director Apted photographs with a dreamy yet intensely curious eye, and the result is a slow but curiously absorbing entertainment, something like a stroll through a well-restored historic house where one is led to romanticize the lives once led there.

This mood is encouraged by the story. It posits a dreadfully shy and innocent Christie hopelessly in love with her bumptiously philandering husband and so distraught over his affair with his secretary that she follows the woman to the spa. There the mystery writer plots, as neatly as she would one of her novels, a crime that will 1) put her out of her romantic misery and 2) wreak suitable vengeance on her husband and his mistress. This is as plausible as any other explanation of Christie's disappearance, though no more persuasive than any other that might be dreamed up by a clever person confronting the puzzle. What is persuasive, or at least highly appealing, is the tentative, restorative relationship that develops between Christie and the American journalist who discovers her whereabouts and falls so deeply in love with her that he cannot break the story.

Christie is played by Vanessa Redgrave, the American by Dustin Hoffman -a very odd couple indeed. Redgrave simply has no peer when it comes to playing women rendered both vulnerable and awkward by the intensity of emotions that cannot be fully expressed. She is lovely and touching. Hoffman's character is based on a vanished type, the journalistic dandy of the Richard Harding Davis variety. He's a man who travels with a dozen suitcases full of bespoke clothing, knows his way around menus and room clerks, has the air of a self-made man who is pleased with the job he did on himself. Also, of course, she is very tall and he is very short, a fact the movie cheerfully plays up to underscore the improbability of their attraction.

In the end, nothing can come of their relationship; a kiss in a hallway is the extent of their physical contact. But the reporter does unravel the writer's plot in time to prevent her carrying it out. More important, we understand that his attentions are enough to restore her sense of her own worth, to bring her out of her temporary insanity. One might perhaps wish that Apted had not used a diffusion filter quite as often as he did (it sometimes seems the English fog has crept into almost every room his characters occupy), and that he had allowed a little more light to shine on some of his scenes. Nevertheless, and despite the Christie family's objections to this invasion of their historical privacy, this is a very nice movie: quietly, slyly witty, confident enough of its virtues to take its sweet time in telling its story, and marked by two endearing performances.

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