Talk Show

By RICHARD CORLISS

TRIBUTE

Directed by Bob Clark

Screenplay by Bernard Slade

The stage is the performer's space: it belongs to the actor -- or the character -- who is always "on." He is the metaphor matador, the tale twister, the verbal bully who mesmerizes those onstage and in the audience with his endless conjury of felicitous syllables. He is the theater's grand gabby old man, the shaman, the incantator, who goes back to Aeschylus and forward to O'Neill and Osborne, Stoppard and Shepard. Put a spotlight on him, and the eloquence swells, the spell continues. He simply will not shut up.

Scottie Templeton is one such com pulsive performer. To him, silence is gelding and only two sounds are pleasing: his own voice and his listener's laughter. As the central character, comic relief, raisonneur and raison d'etre of Bernard Slade's play Tribute, Scottie kept the jokes flowing as his world collapsed like a burlesque banana's baggy pants. On Broadway, as incarnated by Jack Lemmon, Scottie was a sympathetic soul. With the footlights acting as a DMZ between character and playgoer, Scottie could be abstracted and romanticized: he was the fatally ill trouper doing one heroic final turn.

As Lemmon should know, movies are different. What looks like a character's final tribute from a theater balcony be comes, in movie closeup, an autopsy. And Lemmon, by re-creating his stage performance, has created another, more pitiable Scottie. Lemmon still articulates a lexicon of frayed hopes through his sad-clown face, still works the crowd like an aging but adept masseur. But this Scottie is no longer a man one would care to spend an evening drinking with, or even observing. He chokes on his own gag lines; he straitjackets his son (Robby Benson) in a slapstick embrace. The audience is trapped too. The knowledge, from Reel 1, that Scottie is soon to die forecloses a mortgage on the viewer's affections. Saying the film is a failure becomes an immoral act.

It is, though. Director Clark so little trusts his audience that he italicizes every dramatic revelation with lush music and encourages his players to stick to their stereotypes. Only Lee Remick shines, as Scottie's loving exwife. In the middle of the movie, Lemmon and Remick have a scene together-- just a few moments, really--when they sit together, and remember, and embrace. For once the actors are not performing but behaving; not seizing the viewer's attention, simply absorbing it. For an instant, Tribute becomes what it should have been: not a talk show, but a good movie.

-- By Richard Corliss

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