Once a Comedy, Now an Elegy Crimes of the Heart

By RICHARD CORLISS

The package, as they say in Hollywood, looked great. Three top stars in the movie version of a Pulitzer prizewinning comedy that was also a long-running Broadway hit. A show that found sympathetic humor in incidents that scream like headlines from a Mississippi tabloid: MAMA MAGRATH HANGS SELF AND PET CAT! LENNY MAGRATH'S HORSE STRUCK DEAD BY LIGHTNING! MEG MAGRATH VAMPS CRIPPLED EX-FLAME! BABE MAGRATH BOTRELLE SHOOTS HUSBAND " 'CAUSE I DIDN'T LIKE HIS LOOKS"! A family album of three contentious sisters who laugh and fight and cry and finally surrender to the bond of sororal love. Directed for film by the guy who coaxed Robert Duvall to his Oscar in Tender Mercies. Can't miss.

But like many a Christmas package, Crimes of the Heart neglects to deliver the goods. Once a comedy, it has now become a sad-sack elegy. The events that Henley and her cast pumped life into on Broadway have lost their juice. What went wrong? Is it that the intimate conversations, the teasings of Southern- gothic catastrophes, the colloquial bitchery ("She was known all over Copiah County as cheap Christmas trash"), the climactic conciliations -- all of which seemed fresh, if not downright impudent onstage -- play smug and stilted on the big screen? Or has something precious been lost? When does a faithful, almost literal adaptation turn into a genteel lynching of its source?

The stars are not to blame, though they are all about ten years older than their characters in the play. Diane Keaton is Lenny, the spinster with the shriveled ovary and a motherly protectiveness toward her younger sisters that too often expresses itself in shrill hectoring. Jessica Lange is Meg, the singer, free spirit and hot number, who has come home to suture the family wounds and relive an affair with her old beau Doc Porter (nicely played by Lange's real beau Sam Shepard). Sissy Spacek is Babe, under arrest for the attempted murder of her husband, who had discovered her frolicking with a black teenager. Spacek comes off best, perhaps because she gets to flash her radiant smile after a plethora of roles that forced her to bear down and save the world.

Smiles come hard, alas, when a property is treated with too much respect. Crimes of the Heart won a Pulitzer Prize, not a Nobel. But this kudos can be a curse. Once a play becomes the play, moviemakers like Bruce Beresford (at best an unobtrusive director of human traffic without a natural camera style) attach undue reverence to each line of dialogue. Nobody considers that words spoken in a theater may fall flat in a movie house without the ricochet rhythm provided by audience laughter; everybody concerned tiptoes through the property as if it were the Victoria and Albert Museum.

And all surrender to the Hollywood Cast System. Roles played on Broadway by sharp actresses of minimum star wattage become brass rings for Oscar winners looking for the Next Big Thing. Though Crimes is an ensemble piece, the top gals inevitably compete for the dynamite scene and the revealing close-up. (One wag suggested that the producers should have cast Meryl Streep in all three roles.) So: good intentions, classy names, and what happens? Crimes is ossified into a movie misdemeanor.