Side Trips into Daydream

By RICHARD CORLISS

We all live monologues. These conversations with ourselves are the endless, anarchic commentary running in our brains. They contain -- just barely -- our rage and desperation. They are the rough drafts of spoken discourse, the side trips into daydream irrelevancies, the lusts and prejudices left unsaid but so deeply felt. Ultimately, our interior monologues amount to a lifelong novel in progress, or perhaps the world's windiest suicide note. Transcribed, they could tell more about what we are than everything we do.

They don't get into films much; mainstream movies are mostly fists and kisses. But when a monologue works -- directly, unmediated by elaborate sets and scripts, with one gifted person on a stage -- it can work big. Richard Pryor proved that with his first two concert films. He scalded all civilized pretensions off his persona and helped audiences laugh and gasp at the exposed wound. Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby and Andrew Dice Clay also did monologue movies, but they lacked Pryor's life-or-death juice; they were mainly marketing tie-ins to the comics' celebrity.

Now two wondrous monologists, Lily Tomlin and Eric Bogosian, offer movie- goers a peek into beautiful and diseased minds. The films, based on stage plays, are a bit more careful, more artful, than Pryor's but just as worthy. And just as funny.

Onstage, Tomlin's The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by Jane Wagner, was a solo dazzle and a terrific human comedy. Through its dozen or so characters, it provided a panoramic 20-year history of American womanhood. The heart of the piece is Lyn, earnest careerist-wife-mom, exhausted by achieving feminism's goals: "We can have it all. We already have it all. We just got it all at once." And the narrator is Trudy, bag-lady philosopher: "My mind didn't snap; it was tryin' to stretch itself into a new shape."

In stretching the play to film size, a few things snap. The communal intimacy of live theater, for one; at first the piece sounds more like a rant from across the street than like the compassionate campfire chat it was. But as Search for Signs reaches its climax, artist and author stride over these nettles. If this isn't a goose-bump experience for you, you're just not sentient.

Bogosian's Sex Drugs Rock & Roll, handsomely filmed by John McNaughton, is a 10-pack of modular monologues. The subjects don't interact with one another; they shout at invisible targets. But it's soon manifest that in their common rancor, they constitute a lost tribe of American masculinity. The street stud, the down-home Don Juan, the vicious entertainment lawyer, a couple or three psychopaths -- all plan their killer strategies and lullaby themselves with fantasies of apocalypse and revenge. Bogosian rarely sentimentalizes his creatures or provides the familiar monologue arc of comedy, poignancy, comedy. As writer he creates and stands back; as actor he inhabits while he satirizes. He implicates himself.

The two films display the best acting in current movies -- volcanic emotions, precisely explored. But their great gift is to tell you what folks think when no one is listening. "If they ever knew what I was thinkin', man," says one of Bogosian's drugged-out misanthropes, "I'd be dead." But these movies know that the mysterious mind is where we all live. With acute daring, Tomlin and Bogosian say, These people are not other people. They're us, inside.