What Dreams Come To

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: PASSION FISH

WRITER-DIRECTOR: JOHN SAYLES

THE BOTTOM LINE: There are pleasures in this female-buddy recovery movie -- if you have the patience to discover them.

HUMONGOUS GENERALIZATION OF the week: Hollywood movies are masculine; foreign and independent films are feminine. Most Hollywood efforts -- the action movies, comedies, domestic thrillers -- come at you like a teenage boy in heat, working hard to dazzle with energy and patter when they are not being brutal and obscene. What you often end up sitting through is two hours of guys gunning their engines. John Sayles' film Passion Fish has a line about this tendency. When the heroine is told that a suitor might take her for a ride in his refurbished boat, she notes wryly, "Men like that: to show women their machines."

Sayles would like to show you a woman's mind and heart. This American independent (Return of the Secaucus 7, The Brother from Another Planet) gives his movies the leisurely tempo, the sensible aspirations of foreign films; he means to get at the way real people behave, without the hysterics of Hollywood melodrama. So Passion Fish -- a female-rehab movie about May-Alice (Mary McDonnell), an actress made paraplegic in a car crash, and her helpful nurse, Chantelle (the ever splendid Alfre Woodard) -- is notable for what it doesn't show: the collision, the sight of May-Alice's mangled legs, even a clip from , the old movie she watches during the edgy vigil of her recovery. Passion Fish is an antidote to a male-buddy uplifter like Scent of a Woman. It suggests that heroism is found not in the public victories we achieve but in the intimate truths we learn to accept.

The truths here are that life is uphill and that cheerfulness makes the climb easier. These are bromides familiar from many a TV disease-of-the-week movie, and Sayles takes his sweet time mixing them. The film consumes two hours plus, yet the ending seems abrupt, as if Act III was left off. It has the feel of a short story that went on too long.

Still, like the good short-story writer he is, Sayles enjoys listening to people, picking up their quirks and cadences. These characters don't barge into Passion Fish, they just drop by. And they are worth the visit. The movie squirms to life when the subsidiary folk appear: Rennie (David Strathairn), the engaging "swamp Cajun" with the motor boat; Chantelle's beau Sugar (Vondie Curtis-Hall), whose pleasure in women is a contagious delight; Kim (Sheila Kelley) and Nina (Nancy Mette), two soap-opera actresses who give zest and drama to any line reading; May-Alice's gay, weary old friend Reeves (Leo Burmester), who chats about "homoerotic delftware" that bears the likenesses of "little Dutch boys in compromising positions." Reeves sells homes now. "Real estate," he muses. "What our dreams come to."

Passion Fish says that in the pay-back '90s, reality is what our dreams have come to. When Sayles lays aside his TV-movie thesis and sends ingratiating people May-Alice's way, he makes her hard reality seem like a dream come true.