HUGH AND CRY

By RICHARD CORLISS

REALLY NOW, HOW LONG CAN the Western world remain obsessed with Hugh Grant's one-night tour of Sunset Strip? Three weeks ago, when the English actor was arrested in Hollywood for felonious fellatious activity with a hooker named Divine Brown, it was inevitable that late-night talk-show host Jay Leno would crack wise ("Welcome to Hollywood, or, as Hugh Grant calls it, Tonsiltown!"). But deep into July, Grant's peccadillo is still front-page news and late-night joke fodder. Last week, as he dutifully kept four talk-show dates in the U.S. to promote his new comedy, Nine Months, he was also a reluctant nightly guest on David Letterman's Top 10 list. Least Popular Summer Drink No. 6: "Hugh Grant's Backseat Snapple."

In the world beyond Hollywood, the incident was met with various questions: "Why did he do it?" "Why not?" "Hugh Grant is heterosexual?" and "Who's Hugh Grant?" If the story had any sizzle, it was because of the endearing persona the actor created in his one hit movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and in his eight-year amour with model Elizabeth Hurley. Snarly musclemen and tortured teen types, the Stallones and Depps, are supposed to misbehave; it's part of their public profile. But when the sinner is an Oxford grad peddling a boyish, domestic charm--the last good hope of vanishing gentility--he can expect to face the rude music. On his field trip into the Sunset night, Grant went out of character, played disastrously against type, punctured a popular illusion. As many moviegoers saw it, he didn't cheat on Hurley so much as he cheated them.

So the beleaguered Brit had every reason to suspect that, at 34, just as his name was to appear above the title of his first big Hollywood film, his career was over--that he might be the new answer to the question, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" Public reaction to his $60 misunderstanding could cost 20th Century Fox, distributor of Nine Months, $60 million in box-office receipts. And his mug shot might be remembered longer than all his other pictures. On Friday's Today show, Katie Couric wondered, "When do you think you'll finally stop being asked about this?" Grant's quick answer was "Never."

Now it appears that Grant may get the last laugh. It is an axiom of modern show biz that every scandal is a career move. Grant may have saved his career by going on his Summer Atonement Tour--by telling Jay and Katie how sorry he was to have hurt his family and girlfriend, by schmoozing stalwartly with Regis and Kathie Lee, by enduring Larry King's penny-Freud psychoanalyzing while admitting that his own behavior was "disloyal and shabby and goatish." And by defending Hurley (who uneasily accompanied him to the Nine Months Hollywood premiere) against the predatory voyeurism of the tabloid press. "They can go on hounding me, I suppose, as much as they like," he told Couric. "But they should damn well leave her alone."

He wasn't on these shows merely to flog himself; he was there to promote his movies. A workaholic in the English acting tradition, Grant has made 18 films in eight years, and part of the pleasure of following him has been to see a fellow with leading-man looks play so many variations on the upper-class twit. Last year, besides his suavely manic turn in Four Weddings, he was seen as the prim prelate in the Australian soft-core Sirens and as an hors d'oeuvre to a sexually voracious woman in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon. Now three more Grant films are in the U.S. malls: he is the lead in Nine Months and An Awfully Big Adventure and a supporting player in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain.

British filmmakers are ever mindful of the glory days, nearly a half-century ago, when the Ealing Studios produced a smart series of social comedies. Two of Grant's new films aim for that mixture of nostalgia and satire. The Englishman ... is writer-director Christopher Monger's fable about a Welsh village whose denizens are determined that their local hill (elevation 300 m) be declared a mountain (elevation at least 305 m). Grant, as the English surveyor who is finally seduced by their cause, struts and tut-tuts through his part with authority, but all his patented exertions can't keep the film from proceeding at a geriatric pace.

An Awfully Big Adventure, directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings) and adapted by Charles Wood from Beryl Bainbridge's novel, has the convincingly seedy look--almost the dank smell--of Liverpool after World War II. Even a visiting theater troupe seem tired and tatty under their gaudy makeup. With baths a luxury, the locals can afford only to dream. That, at least, is the route taken by young Stella (Georgina Cates, in an affecting star debut), who joins the troupe and falls in love with its dashing director (Grant). For Stella he's just the wrong person: homosexual, vicious, smooth as snake oil. Grant here is wonderfully assured, residing inside this rotter as if he'd been waiting to play the role all his life. It's one of the good things to say about the actor: in big parts or small, he just wants to act.

But Hollywood wanted to make him a star, so he tries that in Nine Months, a big burly romp from director Chris Columbus (the Home Alone hits, Mrs. Doubtfire). Yet another high-concept comedy based on a French film, Nine Months tracks a child psychologist (Grant) and his dance-teacher lover (Julianne Moore, acute as always) from pregnancy through delivery of a baby the man isn't at all ready for.

Columbus sidesteps certain iffy issues raised in the French original--where the man, on hearing of his impending fatherhood, says to his girlfriend, "I have the honor to ask you to have an abortion," and later has a sexual fling on the side--for more general, genial comedy. The movie also gets unwontedly frantic toward the end, with slapstick brawls and auto injuries. (Note to Hollywood: Can you outlaw funny car crashes, starting right now?) But the film has a cleverness that is as irresistible as it is predictable, and Grant eventually looks comfortable in the main role he has to play here: movie star.

Onscreen and off, Grant's shtick is to stammer; words are land mines around which he stumbles nonchalantly. Even with a script, Grant has a rougher time getting through a sentence unharmed than anyone since Jimmy Stewart. And so, in his weeklong mass-media confession, it took a while for him to become sure of himself--sure, that is, of the Hugh Grant he was playing for the largest audience ever to see him (the night he appeared, the Tonight Show won its highest ratings since Leno's first month as permanent host).

In his Tonight appearance on Monday, Grant's obvious nervousness ("I've never been one to, you know, blow my own trumpet") made the audience titter. But as his magical misery tour moved through the week, he gradually learned how to perform in this difficult role: part humiliation, part wry soldiering on. With King, he called his grandmother in as a character witness, quoting her as saying, "What I tell people, darling, is that you had a few drinks with the boys and then got a bit fresh with the girls--and leave it at that."

As Grant also told King, "I would rather be famous than notorious." These days you can't have one without the other. But an actor so ingratiating, and who has suffered so publicly, is ripe for absolution. The odds are that moviegoers will contribute to the Hugh Grant Defense Fund one movie ticket at a time. Their attitude may be that of the prostitute who will always be linked with him: to err is Hugh, man; to forgive, Divine.