Romance of the Rosenbergs

By RICHARD CORLISS

DANIEL Directed by Sidney Lumet; Screenplay by E.L. Doctorow

We know that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the Depression-era bank robbers and murderers, were really a couple of lovable kids who just got their stars crossed. The movies told us so. Now audiences are to be instructed in the exemplary lives of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Sure they were convicted and executed for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. But we know that the 1950s were a time of anti-Red hysteria; the sitting judge on the Rosenberg case might have been Joe McCarthy. How do we know? Daniel tells us so. Alas for Sidney Lumet, history hangs like a crape cloud over his new film. The Rosenberg File, just published to a chorus of raves, scrupulously documents Julius Rosenberg's involvement with a Soviet spy ring; Ethel was probably a knowledgeable but passive member of the cabal. Since the authors' preliminary findings were published in 1979, Daniel's angry grimace looks like a rictus of brazen naivete.

Be generous for a moment. Grant Lumet and Screenwriter E.L. Doctorow (whose novel, The Book of Daniel, the film follows closely) creative license and a clean slate. Daniel is, after all, the story not only of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, but also of their children Daniel and Susan and their attempts to understand and revive what the film's press notes describe as the Isaacsons' "dream of social justice."

The film flashes fro and to in both time and style, alternating the fluorescent glare of the late 1960s, as Daniel (Timothy Hutton) searches for the truth about his parents, with the hazy twilight glow of his parents' day, when spellbinding romantics saw a golden future for American Communism.

The oldtime Communists were a strange breed: passionate and crafty in agitating for civil and union rights but blinkered idealists against the evidence of repression, even genocide, within the Soviet Union. These radical "good Germans" had their excuses, as do all true believers. But were they as ingenuous as Daniel makes them out to be? On the film's testimony, U.S. Communists were a folk-singing choir who loved picnics, baseball and Joseph Stalin, roughly in that order. Paul Isaacson (Mandy Patinkin) was the party's star tummler, strutting as vivaciously on Death Row as he would have on the Borscht Belt. And Rochelle (Lindsay Grouse) was a righteous, steel-rimmed Yiddish mama.

As fact or as fancy fiction, Daniel rarely achieves its ambitions. Hutton, Grouse, Amanda Plummer (as Susan), Ellen Barkin (as Daniel's wife) and Tovah Feldshuh (as a childhood friend) are among the most talented and persuasive of young stars; here they are either given little to do or are buried in charmless roles. One brief sequence suggests the film's potential power. At a rally for their parents, Daniel and Susan, then 12 and 7, are passed toward the stage on the upstretched hands of the faithful; the children are moved and frightened by this show of support that also seems like the cheek-tweaking of thousands of doting aunts and uncles. For the rest of the film, though, ambiguity gives way to a fierce, sentimental rhetoric that does no justice to the Old Left, and subverts Daniel as well.

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.