1 APRIL 1995, Page 45

Cinema

Nobody's Fool (`15', selected cinemas)

Rugged cracks

Mark Steyn

I'm boycotting the Oscars this year over their decision, on a trivial technicality, to declare The Last Seduction ineligible. Linda Fiorentino knocks all the Best Actress nominees out of the ring as a steely, end- I8sly improvising double-crosser; if there were an award for Best Tough Guy In Motion Pictures With A Name Ending In - ntino she'd beat Quentin Tara- all hollow, too: it's out now on video.

In other categories, not a great night for British film, Elton John and Tim Rice aside. I thought Nigel Hawthorne deserved better if only because his strange blend of pompous pathos was ranged against a lot of one-note performances: it was The Madness Of King George versus the badness of John Travolta (Pulp Fiction), the sadness of Morgan Freeman (The Shawshank Redemption), the ladness of Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump) and the plaidness of Paul Newman (Nobody's Fool). Nobody's Fool is awash in plaid, but I'm not sure about Newman's: he plays an ornery cuss, casual- ly employed and casually unemployable, in a decaying small town in upstate New York. On such a man, a winter shirt should look as if it was 'put on the Monday after Thanksgiving and won't be removed until after mud season in the spring. Newman's is too pressed and fancy, the lightweight stuff you wear for faggotting about `Christmas day was a real killer.' southern Connecticut, not for unloading a truckful of shingles when it's 30 below.

Richard Russo's original novel belongs to a genre of American small-town fiction where nothing happens. If New York and Los Angeles are what they call happenin' scenes, then these books are non-happenin' scenes. The uneventfulness is the whole point. They're tuned to the slow, steady turn of the seasons in a climate where mother nature rises up and tries to throttle the life out of you for five months a year: if you can put up with that without getting too excited, chances are you're not going to go in for car chases. If you're in the mood, the even pace is very satisfying; if you're not, it's a bit like standing in line behind a party of very old biddies whose rapacious- ness at the All-U-Can-Eat salad bar is in inverse proportion to their ability to carry the stuff back to the table — one of the scenes from Russo's novel which, alas, has not made it through to Robert Benton's film version. Russo's novel spreads over the best part of a year; Benton's movie takes place between Thanksgiving and Christmas — a compression which renders the book's slow, mellow, mature building of relation- ships into something more pat and Holly- wood.

Benton's best known for Kramer v. Kramer. This time, with Newman, it's Sully v. nobody in particular. Oh, sure, his ex- wife and the son he abandoned and the grandkids he hardly recognises and the construction boss whose snow-blower he steals don't especially like him, but it's that sentimental dislike which is just an excuse for cathartic opening-up heart-to-hearts before the end of the picture. The random cruelties of small-town life, which Russo captures so well, are mostly banished: in the book, the old lady at the diner dies when the drawer of the cash register flies out and hits her in the face; here, she just dies 'cause she's old. And, of course, every- one looks a lot better: in the book, the big out-of-town developer scraps his plans for a theme-park because, he says, frankly the locals look a little weird; here, the locals are played by Newman, Bruce Willis and Jessica Tandy.

And yet the film does draw you in to the same measured tempo of the novel. The only intrusion of Hollywood values comes when Melanie Griffith flashes her breasts at Newman and we glimpse briefly the sili- con implants she treated herself to during Bonfire Of The Vanities. Otherwise, caught between those rocks and a hard place, the picture takes its cue mostly from the town, a ramshackle Main Street of boarded up storefronts which seems set in an eternal winter. Griffith and Gene Saks, as a one- legged lawyer, and Bruce Willis, as the town bigshot, and Jessica Tandy, as Sully's landlady, succeed in pooling their star sta- tuses to create a rare sense of a real com- munity: this is a film where, like the ever-falling snow, the characters and plot webs lightly accumulate and settle. ► In Russo's book, they talk in the kind of plausible wisecracks that aren't quite funny. It's hard to pull off on film because, in a way, it's the sound of people trying to talk smart without benefit of a scriptwriter — and Newman never shakes off the impression that the dialogue isn't written in his natural rhythm. Also, even though he gamely essays a wonky leg, he has certain disadvantages when it comes to playing a small-town loser. When the lov- able old broad behind the bar drawls at him, 'I'm gettin' too old for this job. You're startin' to look good to me,' you think: hang on, this is Paul Newman. How old does a girl have to be before Newman looks good? Fourteen and a half? The real surprise for me was another performance: I am gettin' too old for this job; Bruce Willis is startin' to act good to me.