Big Mac

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN Directed by Taylor Hackford Screenplay by Douglas Day Stewart

It is as if they shot the novelization instead of the screenplay. An Officer and a Gentleman works more like a paperback page turner than a film intended for the allegedly sophisticated movie audience of the '80s. It is full of bang-on melodramatics and simple, romanticized characters with carefully supplied motivations. Aside from a few delightfully dishonorable throwbacks, we haven't had moviemaking like this since the '50s, and maybe we don't want it. But what a long-denied pleasure it is to make up one's own parodies as the film unreels rather than try to force a laugh or two at some arrested adolescents' idea of what is funny about people who are at once stupid and entirely serious about themselves.

The situation is a classic. Zack Mayo (How do they think up names like that?) is the son of a Navy enlisted man, whose daddy is seen elaborately not loving him in the prologue. To get back at him, Zack (Richard Gere) must become, well, "an officer and a gentleman." He enrolls in Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School, a form of organized flagellation that we are led to believe makes all other brands of basic training look like the vicar's lawn party. Underneath Zack's sullen exterior, the discerning eye can detect "the right stuff," as it were. The discerning eye in this case belongs to a black drill sergeant, played with malevolent high spirits by Louis Gossett Jr. Of course, Zack's spirit will first have to be broken, a process Gossett undertakes with relish. Then too Zack will have to Learn to Love, which, of course, means Learning to Trust. Luckily, Paula Pokrifki (Debra Winger) is around to take are of that educational effort. The movie holds that girls who hang around officer candidates are not above faking pregnancy in order to grab a man due to don an upmarket uniform, and Zack is supposed to wonder, for at least three seconds, if that is Paula's game.

It is perhaps unnecessary to add that women will cheer and men will weep (and vice versa) when Zack passes all the tests the Navy and the opposite sex can devise and emerges as a man worthy of having a few million bucks' worth of F-111 in his hands, not to mention a lovely bride. Gere and Winger play this nonsense as if neither one of them had ever seen an old-fashioned military romance, and bless their youthful innocence, perhaps they haven't. Director Hackford, however, surely has, since he demonstrates an encyclopedic eye for their cliches. All eagerly serve Writer Stewart's earnest desire to reduce experience (he is a Navy OCS graduate) to pulp. Never does a satirical gleam enter anyone's eye. The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul. --By Richard Schickel

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