SEX! CONTROVERSY! BOX OFFICE!

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Sexual harassment is a good subject for legal briefs, psychological studies and outraged essays. It is not a natural topic for popular entertainments. Typically (to put it mildly), the protagonist lacks heroic stature, and it is hard to spin a plot of page-turning intricacy from such a crude offense.

Clever Michael Crichton understood all that when he wrote his best seller Disclosure. That's why he made the aggressor a female executive, her victim a happily married man who has been passed over for her job--and with whom, a decade earlier, she had a hot affair. The role reversal alone gives the story some curiosity value. It may even be, as people connected with the movie version keep insisting in interviews, that the shoe-on-the-other-foot approach to this situation will Make You Think.

Maybe so. Or then again, maybe not. For when Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) charges Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) with harassment after he rejects her advances and then risks his future at DigiCom, the software company where they're jostling for position, by leveling the same charge at her, their case starts to become more singular than paradigmatic. For it develops that she has something other than a desktop (or should one say laptop?) frolic in mind when she invites him up to her office for an after-hours meeting--she's trying to turn him into a corporate fall guy.

Their sexual encounter teeters on the brink of both risibility and improbability. It's hard to accept that an experienced man would permit a completely obvious seduction to proceed as far as this one does if it was unwanted; fellatio has begun before he starts emitting virginal squeaks of protest. As the movie develops, we are meant to perceive a causal link between Meredith's sexual voraciousness and her incomprehensible corporate schemings. Eventually they begin to feel like a lot of plotting for plotting's sake, something to do for the second half of what would otherwise have been a very short and simple tale.

But it must be said that director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio are great guys to waste time with. As he's proved with Quiz Show, the latter has a real flair for writing strong, confrontational scenes--brisk, needling, well shaped--and the former stages them with coolly concentrated intensity. And the cast is terrific. Douglas, with Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct behind him, knows all about playing male victimization without total loss of amour propre. Moore's ferocity is totally unredeemed, therefore totally riveting. Donald Sutherland as their boss is computer-like: he has an almost-human brain and a silicon chip where his heart should be. They and a very good supporting cast often ground Disclosure in some kind of behavioral honesty, almost turn it into a realistic portrait of the modern American workplace--full of false camaraderie, anxious rumors and secret status warfare. But not to worry. When truth and cheap thrills compete in a movie, you know what must win out in the end.