Warty Worm

By RICHARD CORLISS

SHE-DEVIL

Directed by Susan Seidelman Screenplay by Mark R. Burns and Barry Strugatz

Watching Meryl Streep as Mary Fisher, romance novelist, is like seeing Margaret Thatcher play the horse in a Christmas pantomime -- and with delicious style. The great gray lady of movie drama brings her precise acting tools to a comedy of manners, flouncing wittily onto a couch, exhaling every word in swooning intimacy, switching from fawn to fume in the wink of a lover's indiscretion. She can even speak American English without an accent. Surprise! Inside the Greer Garson roles Streep usually plays, a vixenish Carole Lombard is screaming to be cut loose.

Streep is the one reason to catch (maybe next year on video) this choppy adaptation of Fay Weldon's exemplarily mean-spirited novel. The story could serve as a parable of feminist revenge. Mary steals accountant Bob Patchett (Ed Begley Jr.) away from his fat, drab, warty wife Ruth (Roseanne Barr). Then Ruth, with a systematic resourcefulness she has never displayed as a homemaker, destroys everything Bob loves: house, family, career, freedom. The worm turns into a winner.

As a BBC-TV series, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil went gleefully over the top, pitying or despising all its characters. But comedy on the American plan can go soft, as Barr proved when she gave her abrasive stand-up-comic persona a sweetie-pie makeover for her hit TV show. She-Devil does the same to Weldon, without substituting much style or attitude. The movie is its own sitcom pilot, and only Streep watchers will be laughing.