Modern Messiah

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SIMON

Directed and Written by Marshall Brickman

Premise No. 1: There is this rogue think tank in which the five resident geniuses have reverted to their original states--high school science club weirdos pulling technological pranks. Reading a survey indicating that the majority of Americans believe in extraterrestrial beings, the scientists decide it would be neat to produce one just to see what the reaction would be.

Premise No. 2: An overly ambitious assistant professor of psychology (Alan Arkin) is afflicted with intellectual pretentiousness and a messianic complex. He is also an orphan, which means that it might be possible to convince him and everyone else that he was produced "like a toaster" on some other planet and brought to earth in a spaceship. The mad scientists put the hero in a water tank for days to take him back beyond the womb. They induce false but highly persuasive memories of his origins and, incidentally, provide Arkin with a tour de force mime sequence in which he acts out the old saw about ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.

This is a complex base for comedy, but Writer-Director Marshall Brickman, making his first film after honorable service as Woody Allen's writing collaborator, brings it off. He blends accomplished directorial technique with writing that is slyly funny and acute in its social commentary. If, perhaps, the film lacks the punctuation that a big comic sequence would provide--something like the chase scene with the dictator's nose in Allen's Sleeper--it is consistently energetic, inventive and, above all, intelligent.

This is particularly so once Arkin's character gains access to the media and starts laying down the law to a civilization he believes decadent. His rhetoric is garbled biblical, but his program is eminently practical. He recommends a constitutional amendment banning Muzak and fines for people who talk about needing their own space. He also thinks it would be nice if politicians, when pontificating on TV, were forced to wear party hats so that viewers could keep their remarks in perspective. The message is simple: Ye shall know a civilization by its common customs, and if these are mostly absurd, then it is likely that the society's larger principles have gone awry as well. The modern world's institutionalized lunacies are, of course, symbolized by the lavishly subsidized think tank and the mischief it creates.

One cannot help admiring Brickman's comic discipline, his refusal to make heavyhanded attacks. He is a car om-shot artist, deft and softspoken, and an actor's director as well. Arkin comes closer than ever before to breaking through the reserve that sometimes straitjackets his unquestionable comic technique. Judy Graubart is winning as his realistic girlfriend. The guys at the lab-- Austin Pendleton, William Finley, Wallace Shawn, Max Wright and Jayant--manage to satirize every imaginable form of intellectual hubris. Their cause is a worthy one, and so is their director's debut.

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