Designated Heroine

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DYING YOUNG

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Screenplay by Richard Friedenberg

Hilary O'Neil (Julia Roberts) is poor but healthy, uneducated but full of spunky common sense. Victor Geddes (Campbell Scott) is rich but mortally ill, overeducated and understandably fearful and withdrawn. In other words, they are made for each other.

If close to a century of movie history has not taught us that, then the past year of Roberts' professional history certainly has. For she has become the designated heroine of our redemptive fairy tales. Having taught a workaholic conglomerateur how to love in Pretty Woman and herself how to overcome the battered-wife syndrome in Sleeping with the Enemy, surely she can help Victor come to grips with the sadness of Dying Young.

The trouble with this story is its predictability. Act I: boy and girl meet querulously. Act II: they love rapturously, and that sends Victor's leukemia into remission. Act III: illness returns, love falters, but everyone eventually learns to face an unknowable future with a certain fortitude.

Within the confines of its conventions, the film handles its material fairly honorably. It does not prettify the rigors of cancer treatment, and it does not pump out a cloud of cheap sentiment when things start to go bad for the patient. But if anything redeems Dying Young, it is the playing. Roberts has a bead on the twentysomething spirit -- its curious blend of certainty and confusion -- and Scott catches the inwardness and detachment of a figure astonished to find himself exploring the near side of the far side prematurely. The cool tact of his performance is all the more effective for its understatement and -- just what this picture needs -- its total lack of predictability.