Remade The American Way

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLES: SOMMERSBY AND THE VANISHING

GENRE: MISSING-PERSON DRAMA, EXPORTED TO HOLLYWOOD

THE BOTTOM LINE: Cultural transplants improve two European art-house hits.

Americans -- go figure. They can't make a better car or car stereo. They can't stanch their national debt. They can't impose a new world order. But they can fix up a foreign-movie drama like doctors slapping an anemic newborn into shape until it is a bionic baby. It looks so smart, so strong, so very . . . Hollywood.

Sommersby, about a young Tennessee husband who goes away to the Civil War and comes home a changed man, is based on the 1982 French film The Return of Martin Guerre. The Vanishing, the tale of a young Seattle woman who goes away for a beer and never comes home, is a remake of a 1988 Dutch thriller. The original movies had their admirers, but neither property could be sold as is to the U.S. mass audience. Some expert renovation was in order. Cunning Hollywood script doctors had to approach the European originals not as finished portraits but as sketches in need of coherence, heart, pizazz. It's what rewriters do: refashion a boutique item so it will jump off the shelves at the mall.

The Vanishing -- directed in both versions by George Sluizer -- misplaces its leading lady early. She disappears at a highway rest stop, leaving her lover Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) angry, then for years obsessed. He wants to know what happened. We already do. At least, we know whodunit. Barney (Jeff Bridges), a nerdy schoolteacher with the improbable accent of a Swedish Peter Lorre, has abducted her and taken her to his lakeside cottage. When Barney reveals himself, Jeff must decide whether his need to know the ending, even a tragic one, to his story -- and they all died horribly ever after -- is worth putting his fate in Barney's treacherous hands.

Such was the moral of the Dutch Vanishing: curiosity killed the cat. It's a provocative premise, but it wants some legerdemain and a third act. Enter screenwriter Todd Graff (Used People). He takes the original's perplexing flashback structure, flattens it out and fattens it up, mostly by creating a new character, a waitress (Nancy Travis) who falls in love with Jeff. Graff changes the theme: now knowledge is just a cue for righteous revenge. The Dutch movie had no gun; in a Hollywood thriller there must be a gun, and it will go off. The original's ending was misanthropic, claustrophobic -- a fellow in a tight spot with no way out but death. Graff provides a rousingly standard climax, putting the heroine at mortal risk in an old dark house and then letting her triumph. It makes for sturdy melodrama, old-style. You've seen it work a million times. Well, it works again.

Martin Guerre was an art-house hit, and is the source for a new musical with Broadway hopes. The story, based on 16th century fact, raised poignant issues: Do we ever know the person we love? Could he be someone else, someone better? What matters in a lover: his identity or his behavior? And, given the choice, would we trade him in for a model that was new, improved -- and a fraud?

Even with beguiling performances by Gerard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, the French movie was austere business. And it dodged the issue of how easily a wife or a relative could ascertain if a man was who he claimed to be. (Five intimate questions, and it could be settled in a flash.) In Hollywood they know how to solve problems: by obscuring them. So they made Sommersby a fervid romance swathed in star quality. Who is this masked man? Richard Gere, lighting a fire in Jodie Foster; what else matters? Especially when the fellow, a Southern cousin to The Music Man's Professor Harold Hill, so expertly peddles 76 corn pones -- a tobacco crop, a parcel of hope -- to his neighbors, who are eager to ride his promise out of the Civil War's rubble and into prosperity and community.

Three expert story cobblers -- Nicholas Meyer (The Seven-Percent Solution), Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth) and Sarah Kernochan (Impromptu) -- add a murder charge, drop a last-second deus ex machina and, aided by savvy British director Jon Amiel (The Singing Detective), manufacture a seductive entertainment. Is Sommersby a great movie, or even an honorably affecting one? Not quite; there are too many reaction shots of sweet young cheeks stained with big wet tears. But it offers the cleanest, ripest version of the tale. It translates the original true story, just as it transforms Martin Guerre, from European ambiguity into robust Hollywood fantasy.