Waterland

((British-U.S.--Color))

A Fine Line Features release of a Palace and Fine Line presentation in association with Pandora Cinema and Channel Four Films with the participation of British Screen of a Palace production. Produced by Katy McGuinness, Patrick Cassavetti. Executive producers, Nik Powell, Stephen Woolley, Ira Deutchman. Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal. Screenplay, Peter Prince, based on the novel by Graham Swift.

Tom Crick ... Jeremy Irons
Matthew Price ... Ethan Hawke Mary Crick ... Sinead Cusack
Lewis Scott ... John Heard
Judy Dobson ... Cara Buono
Young Tom ... Grant Warnock
Young Mary ... Lena Headey
Dick Crick ... David Morrissey
Freddie Parr ... Callum Dixon
Henry Crick ... Peter Postlethwaite

High school teacher Jeremy Irons walks his students through the physical and emotional landscapes of his troubled life in "Waterland," a talented but terminally parched piece of literary cinema. Decorous, academic treatment of bizarre and traumatic material makes for a merely unpleasant film rather than an insightful or genuinely disturbing one. Irons' name and possibility of some good notices will give this a foothold in the international art market, but audience appeal will be distinctly limited. Palace production opened in the U.K. over the weekend.

Graham Swift's recent novel was one of those highly regarded tomes that attracted the attention of numerous filmmakers but invariably prompted the question of how it could possibly be adapted for the screen.

Despite a tight and cleverly constructed time-jumping structure, it can't be said that scenarist Peter Prince has really solved the problem, since what's on-screen unfortunately creates the constant impression of a story that would be much more effectively told on the printed page.

From a Yank perspective at least, this twisted, inbred yarn is not the sort of thing normally associated with British accents, scarfed pipe smokers and memory flashbacks. At heart, this is a Southern Gothic tale of sordid family secrets, rife with illicit teenage sex, deadly moonshine, a daughter-wife, a lumbering retarded brother and a backwoods abortion.

Impetus for spilling the 30-year-old saga lies in the impulse that teacher Tom Crick (Irons) has to bring history alive by personalizing it.

Seeing that his Pittsburgh students find little relevance in his lectures about the French Revolution, Crick begins telling them about his own upbringing in the odd area called the Fens--bleak, flat marshlands in East Anglia on the North Sea.

As the film cuts back and forth between the present (1974) and moments in the past, Crick frequently dwells on the erotic as he describes how, at 16, he and his sweetheart Mary used to have feverish sex in private train compartments, how his pathetic "potato head" brother reacted violently and jealously to sexual knowledge and provocation, and how Crick came to view history as an infinite collection of stories.

As we see Mary in the present, she is a barren woman in her 40s with a pathological desire for a child, someone clearly off the deep end who will soon resort to drastic measures. When she finally kidnaps a baby, she insists that "I got him from God" (she is named Mary, after all), and the interlocking structure links her ongoing trauma to the ghastly illegal abortion she had to undergo in her teens.

To the extent that it concerns sex, the film has a certain pull. Tom and Mary's adolescent precociousness possesses a contagious kick, and the weird subplot involving Tom's aptly named brother, Dick --and Mary's failed attempt to initiate him into the mysteries of the body--connects in a morbidly interesting manner.

But on any grander dramatic or thematic levels, "Waterland" fails to pull together in meaningful ways. When Tom's most insolent student, Matthew Price (Etan Hawke), challenges him to defend the teaching of history, one awaits the elaboration of the teacher's justification with reasonable expectation.

Instead, we get superficial, borderline-laughable scenes of the students riding through moments of British history in an open-air tour bus, and a summing-up by Tom that, in its fumbling sentimentality, seems like a portrait of the deterioration of teacher-student relations since the days of Mr. Chips.

In the service of the film's inability to achieve much of depth or substance, considerable skill is nevertheless on display. Irons does his best to carry the project through thick and thin but can't entirely break through its fundamental reediness. As his wife, Irons' real-life mate, Sinead Cusack, seems utterly possessed, beyond the care even of the man who has known her intimately for three decades.

Grant Warnock proves a reasonable teenage facsimile of Irons, while the most vivid impression is made by Lena Headey, who makes young Mary into a vibrant, lovely but sometimes inscrutable girl. Ethan Hawke and, as the thick-headed Dick , David Morrissey also have potent moments.

The desolate wet expanses of Britain's eastern coast compose a haunting, unfamiliar setting for the wartime flashback sequences and Robert Elswit's images have an appropriate soft moistness to them.

American director Stephen Gyllenhaal, praised for last year's "Paris Trout," handles the often delicate subject matter with integrity on a scene-by-scene basis but can't transform what may simply be intractable material.

Camera (Metrocolor, widescreen), Robert Elswit; editor, Lesley Walker; music, Carter Burwell; production design, Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski; art direction, Helen Rayner; costume design, Lindy Hemming; sound (Dolby), Simon Okin; assistant director, David Brown; casting, Susie Figgis (U.K.), Deborah Aquila (U.S.). Reviewed at Culver Studios, Culver City, Aug. 20, 1992. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 95 min.

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