Spring-Cleaning Rummage Sale

By Richard Schickel, Richard Corliss

VIOLETS ARE BLUE

Feminism marches on. In Violets Are Blue, it is the woman who leads a life of romantic adventure, the man who is stuck in the mud of middle-class responsibility, yearning not quite hard enough to fly free. She is Gussie Sawyer (Sissy Spacek), who has left Ocean City, Md., to become an ace photojournalist. He is Henry Squires (Kevin Kline), who has inherited his family's newspaper and the usual passel of burdens: wife, child, civic duties. They were lovers once, and become lovers again when she returns home for a vacation. Will he accept her invitation to join her in the jet streams and write her captions? Or is he going to stay put and continue the good fight to keep his small pond ecologically sound, his nice nuclear family unsplit?

If Spacek and Kline could have generated some electricity between them, this issue might have been more promising. But they are grounded by a predictable script by Naomi Foner and the cliche-ridden direction of Spacek's husband Jack Fisk. The result may someday become a footnote in the history of the impact of feminism on Hollywood romance. Moviegoers looking for fun and frolic are advised to wait for the book. By Richard Schickel

ON VALENTINE'S DAY

Welcome to regional-theater cinema, where locale is a crucial character, the pace is measured in eye drops, and everyone on both sides of the camera aspires to the ordinary. As playwright (The Trip to Bountiful) and screenwriter (Tender Mercies), Horton Foote has backpacked over this terrain for two generations. On Valentine's Day, the prequel (though not the equal) of last year's 1918, marks one more stroll through Foote's family plot. Again we find the Vaughn and Robedaux families forcing smiles and small talk as the Great War rages 5,000 miles from their southeastern Texas town. Again we see Horace Robedaux (William Converse-Roberts) pledging love to his gentle bride Lizzie (Hallie Foote) and declaring his independence from her father's wealth. Drama is tamped down by propriety until it explodes, like a defective firecracker, into the DTs, psychosis and suicide.

Ken Harrison's direction is fine when it captures the languid rhythm of everyday preoccupations and lets its attractive actors (especially Hallie Foote, the author's daughter) breathe quietly through the lace curtains of memory. The mood is so lulling that the intrusion of climactic plot devices involving an alcoholic friend and a cooty cousin seems not only extraneous but downright rude. There goes the neighborhood, and the movie. Instead of a valentine to his ghosts, Foote finally delivers a tardy, clumsy Easter present: Horton Hatches an Egg. By Richard Corliss

JUST BETWEEN FRIENDS

Holly (Mary Tyler Moore) is the ideal mom. She loves hubby (Ted Danson) and the kids; she stretches her body on the rack of aerobics to atone for uncommitted sins. And yet something is missing: oh, a sense of her own radiant personhood. Can she find it with Sandy (Christine Lahti), a TV reporter who needs a best friend too? Maybe not, since, by just the darnedest coincidence, Holly's hubby and Sandy's lover are the same wonderful guy.

$ There are ranker implausibilities, and sadder ironies, in this egregious comedy-drama. Life and death, both contrived, salt the plot; the dialogue freezes in the actors' mouths like psychobabble on a stick; the picture remains immune even to another silk-purse performance by Lahti, the American cinema's best hope for a smart, mature, vulnerable funny woman of the '80s. Mary Tyler Moore carried that standard handsomely through the '70s in a sitcom co-created by Allan Burns, who wrote and directed Just Between Friends. To see them flail here is like running into your dream girl a decade later and finding out she sells Herbalife. R.C.

TROUBLE IN MIND

Maybe Alan Rudolph should just plunk himself down in front of a video console, electronically colorize some old film noir favorite of his and forget it. Instead, the writer-director keeps trying to revitalize that shadowy, romantic style of the '40s by putting a hip spin on it. This strategy worked pretty well for him two years ago in Choose Me, shot in a surreal light and featuring a script that had the giddy loquacity of a liars' convention.

In the interim, however, Rudolph seems to have mislaid his sense of humor, and Trouble in Mind is a walk on the dour side. The locale is "RainCity" (which is not going to please the Chamber of Commerce in Seattle, where the film was shot). A cashiered cop named Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) broods and moralizes as he advances on Wanda (Genevieve Bujold), who runs a shabby cafe and represents experience, and on Georgia (Lori Singer), a waif who represents innocence. Her common-law husband Coop (Keith Carradine) is a hick tough with delusions of gaining grandeur in the urban underworld, but he ends up wearing punk costumes and too much mascara. The picture in turn is plastered over with a heavy layer of intellectual pancake. It is all pretense and portent up to a wild shoot-out at the end, wittily imagined, cunningly staged. But not, perhaps, quite enough of a reward for those who wait around for it. R.S.