Bad Crash

By RICHARD CORLISS

BLOW OUT Directed and Written by Brian De Palma

There are three Brian De Palmas--all the grinning, scheming sons of Alfred Hitchcock. With Sisters and Dressed to Kill, De Palma made his reputation as the Psycho student supreme, drawing curlicues of style and cheerfully obscene graffiti in the margins of that seminal horror-movie text. In Phantom of the Paradise and Home Movies, he displayed an impish, impudent sense of humor that recalls Hitchcock's macabre comedy The Trouble with Harry. But the most passionate Brian De Palma--and maybe the real one--is the child of Vertigo, Hitchcock's essay on the fatal power of obsessive love. In plot skeleton and flesh tones, De Palma's Obsession was a remake of Vertigo, and the prom scene in Carrie suffused its heroine in a mood of crimson romanticism. Blow Out, for all its borrowings from political and cinematic fact and fancy, is one more story of an obsessive idealist lost in a lush forest of intrigue.

Jack (John Travolta) is a sound man, in two ways: he devises aural effects for films, and he carries himself with an air of unassuming rectitude. One night, while on a field trip to tape the whistling wind for a horror movie, he hears the air punctured by the explosion of an automobile tire and sees a car careen through a bridge railing and into the water below. The car contains a presidential hopeful and his lady of the evening, Sally (Nancy Allen). Jack dives in and saves her, but is later warned by police and friends of the deceased politician to forget that she existed. The plot thickens--curdles, really--with hints of Chappaquiddick and Nixonian plumbers, with genuflections to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, with narrative implausibilities and internal contradictions and enough red herrings to stock a Leningrad fish market.

After the simple shocks of Dressed to Kill, De Palma is out to deploy subtler strategies. As a result, Blow Out is less scary but more skillful. One sequence, involving a murderous attack in a Philadelphia train station, tantalizes with portent and discretion. From outside a toilet stall, we see only the victim's feet fluttering beneath the door and then falling still, the limbs of this defenseless animal at rest at last. And twice De Palma exhibits his favorite technique to suggest confusion and resolution: the camera describes circles--four, six, a dozen--around his characters, ribboning them in place to force them to confront their destinies. The viewer must share their turmoil--feel vertigo or mal de mer.

John Travolta, ever the innocent quester, the vulnerable stud, brings charm and passion to Jack's plight, though he can do no more than the other actors faced with several long, redundant dialogue scenes. As an unhinged agent of executive evil, John Lithgow is a study in blank-faced, monotone menace--the G. Gordon Liddy of a liberal's night mares. The big problem is Nancy Allen (Mrs. Brian De Palma). Her Sally should inhabit the romantic center of Jack's surging idealism. Instead she plays for gum-chewing, damaged-Kewpie-doll laughs. Sally's emotional resonance is tinny; it has no echo to catch the inner ear of a sensitive sound man. She is nothing more than a plot device, a congeries of De Palma's movie references. One imagines the actress and the director standing in an airless, doorless room, the walls draped with flickering movie screens and chattering Dolby speakers, as a camera circles around and around them, faster and tighter, locking them in claustrophobic embrace. For their sake and the moviegoer's, they must try to escape.

-By Richard Corliss

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