Monday, Aug. 16, 1982

Comic's Demons

By RICHARD CORLISS

TEMPEST

Directed by Paul Mazursky Screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos

What's the latest equivalent of the comic who wants to play Hamlet? A comic film maker who takes it in mind to rewrite Shakespeare. In the past month, the two most distinguished confectors of '70s movie comedy have genuflected before the Bard in order to elevate the adolescent tone of current screen fare. First, Woody Allen frolicked midst woodland nymphs in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Now Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto) has gone to "an uninhabited island" for his gloss on Shakespeare's last great play.

Mazursky's modern Prospero is Phillip Dimitrious (John Cassavetes), a successful Manhattan architect careering toward a nervous breakdown. He loves his actress wife (Gena Rowlands) but is tired of her. He loves his 14-year-old daughter (a lovely duckling named Molly Ringwald) without quite understanding his paternal possessiveness of her. His rage expresses itself in sudden lightning storms that streak the Manhattan skies and act as the mysterious percussion to the mad music inside his head. Off he goes to Greece, where he finds an earthbound Ariel (the sweetly sensible Susan Sarandon), and finally to his dream isle, where he gets to play semibenevolent despot over his Miranda, his Ariel and a randy goatherd named Kalibanos (Raul Julia).

Mazursky's best films--Blume in Love and An Unmarried Woman--had a lock on the '70s sensibility. This, one could feel, was the way the American upper middle class attempted to face the new demands of sexual and racial equality. And this was the way a sympathetic comic artist, reporting from the inside of the analysand wonderland, could transform these demands and dreams into engaging movie narratives. But when Mazursky tries to Say It All about modern life, his voice can turn strident. His valued collaborators, the actors, can lose their charm and become stick figures, animated ideograms. And his characters plunge deep into their obsessions and forget how arrogant their demons sound when they cry out to be released.

In Tempest, Mazursky is describing not only a mid-life crisis but, metaphorically, the need of an artist-entertainer to escape the pressure to be both profitable and profound. "I wanna quit, I wanna get out, I wanna travel, dream, wander!" Cassavetes exclaims. Mazursky seconds the emotion the only way he knows how: by making a movie about not wanting to be involved in the business of moviemaking. Eventually, though, the artist must return home chaste and chastened. The climax of this two-hour 20-minute odyssey is a series of ecstatic helicopter shots over Lower Manhattan. It is a refreshing vision--like a creme de menthe sipped at twilight in the Windows on the World, 107 stories above the only dream isle our moviemaking Prospero could live in for long or forever.

--By Richard Corliss

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