Split Personality

By RICHARD CORLISS

ALL OF ME Directed by Carl Reiner Screenplay by Phil Alden Robinson

Roger Cobb (Steve Martin) has this little problem: the spirit of a dead woman inhabits and controls the right side of his body. The semitranssexual dilemma is no miracle of genetic engineering but rather a goof-up of Oriental mysticism. Seems that Roger, a 38-year-old lawyer drifting through a mediocre career and toward a no-thrills marriage with the boss's daughter, was named executor of the estate of Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin), one of the world's richest, coldest, frailest and ditsiest women. Edwina had engaged the services of a swami, sect undetermined, to transfer her mind and soul at the moment of death into the healthy body of Terry (Victoria Tennant), the daughter of one of her servants. Then, darn the luck, the sacred urn containing Edwina's essence fell out of a window and onto Roger in the street below. The left side of his body and mind is still male, still Roger, and not a little vexed at having to share the place with an uncongenial new tenant; the right side is prissy Miss Edwina, determined to relocate in Terry's body and find a fulfilling life at last.

At this stage in his career, Steve Martin has a little problem too. In the '70s he was a stand-up-comic sensation. A dream of all-American vacuity with his careful coif, phosphorescent white jacket and conventionally handsome features, Martin came on like a silly Robert Redford, a would-be stud not quite as gorgeous or with it as he thought he was -but lots funnier. When Martin turned to feature films (with The Jerk in 1979), the challenge was to transfer the soul of this character, this smart dumb guy, into the svelte body of a comic-movie hero. It has not always been a snug fit. In Pennies from Heaven he was gung-ho but overwhelmed by the musical machinery; in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid he got lost in a clever construct of old movie clips. By the time The Man with Two Brains came out, Martin's stand-up audience had deserted him. A pity: they missed a small, funny film that provided, in its Frankenstein plot of a surgeon in love with the body of one woman and the brain of another, an '80s allegory of man's quest for Ms. Right.

All of Me continues this Manichaean probe. More important, it gives Martin his best movie chance yet to spotlight his bravura brand of physical comedy. Watch Roger/Edwina attempt to walk down the street, or go to the bathroom, or make love; each move is a sublime display of schizophrenic coordination. Watch right-side Edwina take control in a courtroom, as left-side Roger falls asleep and the ever-so-feminine Edwina moves "their" body in a grotesquely macho strut. The actor's challenge is impossibly complicated -Steve Martin playing Lily Tomlin playing Roger Cobb -and beautifully realized. The rest of All of Me is no tour de farce; some jokes are missing, others misfire, and the visual style is deadpan and pedestrian. But Tomlin gets laughs and poignancy from a character who for most of the film is visible only when Roger looks in a mirror. And Martin vaults to the top of the class with his brazen, precise performance. This one goes in the time capsule.