Coping with the "Cute" Factor

By RICHARD CORLISS

Hard for an actor to cop an Oscar -- or earn a sheaf of rave reviews -- when an audience's first and lasting response to his appearance is "Ooooh, isn't he cute?" His face is a posh prison, his smile a winsome rictus. Because everyone wants to mother him, or date him, or have him for a baby-sitter, nobody will let him grow up. He must remain harmless, asexual, a teen-dream Dorian Gray doll or risk losing the devotion of his millions of chaperones.

A few years ago, America's favorite man-child was Matthew Broderick, star of WarGames in Hollywood and Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway. Today Michael J. Fox holds the peach-fuzz prize. His first big movie, Back to the Future, was the box-office champ of 1985; his sitcom, Family Ties, is now the second most viewed show in Nielsen history. These two attractive actors have confronted the "cute" factor in different ways. Broderick goes off-Broadway between film gigs and appears eager to tackle adult roles that will challenge him and his fans. Fox, though, seems to enjoy being a boy. His new movie hit, The Secret of My Success, finds him still comfortable in his old haberdashery: straitjacket and elfin grin.

! Fox is Brantley Foster, come to conquer the business world. His uncle (Richard Jordan) runs a vulnerable conglomerate; his inamorata (Helen Slater) is the boss's minor squeeze; the older woman who beds Brantley is the boss's wife (Margaret Whitton). And now that we have the farce machinery purring, let's kick it into high gear. Naaah, why bother? Director Herbert Ross and Writers Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. and A J Carothers know this picture exists only as a mobile Michael J. Fox poster, suitable for display on the bedroom walls of twelve-year-olds named Cindy. Secret earned nearly $7.8 million its first weekend, so the Fox conglomerate is thriving anyway. Now if Fox could only make movies worthy of his charm.

Broderick had a smarter idea for expanding his career horizons: get in a good movie. Project X is the best thriller about monkeys since the original King Kong and a touching parable about parenting to boot. In a Wisconsin research lab, Teri MacDonald (Helen Hunt) is teaching sign language to her prize pupil, a chimpanzee named Virgil (beautifully played -- no kidding -- by a chimp named Willie). After two years, Virgil is shipped to an Air Force base in Florida for a top-secret experiment shepherded by Jimmy Garrett (Broderick), a bright, goof-off airman who develops the same parental bond for Virgil that Teri had. Soon Teri, the Mary Beth Whitehead of primate research, is off to Florida to steal back her chimp-child. The ensuing custody battle will involve Jimmy, the Air Force brass and a balky nuclear reactor.

Cannily commercial, Project X has almost too much old gold going for it: strands of The Miracle Worker, Fail Safe, The Elephant Man, Top Gun and the collected works of Steven Spielberg. Like E.T., this is the story of a childlike alien and his lonely human friend who must protect the creature, like a wise father with a brilliant, battered child, and then set it free. But Writers Stanley Weiser and Lawrence Lasker (WarGames) resist nearly every temptation to truckle, and Director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel) finds each scene's emotional core while surrounding it with meticulous technique. But the film is Broderick's. A great listener, he can make a colloquy with a chimp seem like the meeting of true souls. This time, he has gone beyond cute, to acute.