Schemes And Dreams for Christmas

By Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel

Christmas films come in two basic shapes: books and toys. The toys -- doll babies like Home Alone and cuddly creatures like Edward Scissorhands -- may mop up at the box office. But prestige is a Hollywood product too; it can be cashed in for Oscars if enough critics and Motion Picture Academy voters are impressed by what they see. So lauded literary properties like Hamlet and The Sheltering Sky become ambitious films. Herewith, three bookish films hoping for a shelf life that extends past New Year's:

THE GODFATHER PART III

They were like the Kennedys of Massachusetts, an immigrant clan that reaped power and pain in almost equal measure. They were like the Ewings of Dallas, with a brilliant, scheming son wrapping his dirty deals in a whisper and a smile. They were like every family, the Corleones of Mario Puzo's imagination, except they wrote their quarrels in blood. They killed their rivals, and when they felt betrayed from within, they killed each other.

How titillating the Corleones seemed in 1972 and '74, when Francis Ford Coppola turned Puzo's best seller into two Oscar-winning Godfather films. Here was a family of murderers viewed with cool compassion; they did their lurid business with style. Coppola's own style, which set the tone for '70s movies, was called operatic -- meaning that the characters moved slowly, died grandly and emoted at the top of their lungs. The book was a fast, brutal read; the movie saga was an extended, ravishing look.

And now, at long last, a long look back in The Godfather Part III, a meandering but finally quite affecting climax to the saga. It is 1979, and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the sleek, ruthless don, has become a legitimate billionaire. His sister Connie (Talia Shire) has dredged herself out of a sullen stupor to become his feisty adviser. His ex-wife Kay (Diane Keaton) has remarried. His son Anthony (Franc D'Ambrosio) has eyes to become an opera singer. His daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) is itching to grow up and fall in love.

At first Michael is pleased to have his crimson career behind him. When Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), the bastard son of Michael's brother Sonny, shows up ready to bite the ear off any idle Mafioso, Michael tells him, "I don't need tough guys. I need more lawyers." But in his negotiations with a crafty padrone (Eli Wallach), with a gaudy capo (Joe Mantegna), even with some slippery Vatican officials over a European real estate deal, Michael decides he needs tough guys. The question is: Can he still be tough enough to lead them?

That's not a tough question. The Godfather Part III, is a gangster picture, after all, and Michael is the antihero with whom the series lives and dies. The true perplexer is whether filmgoers will care to see, or care about, an aging entrepreneur haunted by specters from films nearly two decades old. Because this is a movie about loss, Pacino must relinquish the steely calm of his youthful Michael; now he is Lear without the grandeur. Nor can G3 find suave new twists and characters to propel the plot and lure the teens. Garcia, an electric actor, swaggers so handsomely that he makes one wish for another sequel. But he is helpless to strike sparks with Sofia Coppola (the director's daughter), whose gosling gracelessness comes close to wrecking the movie.

The first Godfather films sketched a history of the Mafia as a cracked- mirror reflection of American industry. One hoped G3 might pit the Corleones against the bad boys of the drug trade: the old Italians vs. blacks and Hispanics, rustic chivalry vs. cutthroat capitalism. Instead, Coppola, who wrote the screenplay with Puzo, sends Michael on a side trip to Rome and Sicily.

There is some colorful conniving: who'd have guessed that an international cartel fatally poisoned Pope John Paul I? But G3 never persuades one of the urgency of its maxim that "finance is a gun, and politics is knowing when to pull the trigger." With all its boardroom bickering, the plot is a gun that shoots mostly blanks. G3 is too faithful to the deliberate pacing of the first two films: the slow walking into a dark room, the silence surrounding the threats. For two hours the movie labors up the winding path of its story, wheezing like an old man who won't admit his age.

But fidelity has its rewards. Remember how, in the other Godfathers, nearly every religious ceremony (baptism, festival, funeral) is accompanied by a murder? As in the first film, G3 has a spectacular payoff: accounts of honor settled with elaborate vengefulness. As in the second film, a fearful price is paid for power, and Michael is left alone to consider the cost.

It is here, in the ruined face of such a man, that The Godfather Part III locates an emotional gravity rare in American movies. The film is a slow fuse with a big bang -- one that echoes through every family whose own tragedy is an aching for things past and loved ones lost.

By Richard Corliss

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

Aaah, aaaahh, aaaaaah, aaaaahhhh. And also, possibly -- why not? -- aaaaahhhhhhhh. These are the onomatopoetics of anguish (and perverse exhilaration) as rendered by Tom Wolfe toward the end of The Bonfire of the Vanities. They are the sounds made by his protagonist, Sherman McCoy, as he at last acknowledges that he is an all too human animal: capable of rage and deceit and all the other low emotions that people educated at Yale, working on Wall Street and living on Park Avenue usually never discover within themselves, let alone admit in public. They are also the sounds of a man abandoning the last defense of privilege: clever, distancing and self-deluding articulateness. And they are entirely absent from this adaptation of Wolfe's novel.

The omission is both fatal and curious, for in some respects the film conscientiously compressed its source. Its plot has been faithfully rendered by screenwriter Michael Cristofer, and director Brian De Palma has succeeded in the more difficult task of finding a cinematic equivalent for the novelist's singular style. Using unconventional angles, lenses and light, he accomplishes on the screen what Wolfe achieved on the page through deliciously exaggerated dialogue and deadpan parody. De Palma lifts us out of banal realism but stops short of forcing surrealism's affectations upon us.

As most of the civilized world probably knows, this story finds Sherman (well played by Tom Hanks despite miscasting), self-styled Master of the Universe, falling off the edge of that portion of the cosmos known to him. That is to say, he takes a wrong turn into the South Bronx while driving his mistress Maria (Melanie Griffith) home. Seemingly threatened by two black youths in this forbidding landscape, they accidentally injure one of the kids. Since Sherman and Maria dare not make their relationship public, they flee the scene without reporting the incident.

When the victim falls into a coma, his case is taken up by a rabble-rousing ghetto preacher and amplified by a sensation-seeking tabloid journalist (whose relatively small role in the book has been awkwardly expanded to make a star role for Bruce Willis). In turn, the whole affair is relentlessly pressed by prosecutors who are far more interested in playing class and racial politics than in pursuing justice.

But if Sherman is technically innocent of the charges against him, he is guilty of moral blindness. The junk bonds he has so profitably sold are of a piece with the junk politics, junk journalism and junk culture that conspire first to convert him from man into media symbol, then to divest him of all his possessions, including self-possession. When he finally recognizes that awful congruity between what he has been and what the modern world has become, he sets aside the last of his gentlemanly compunctions and turns against his tormentors, fists flailing, strangled cries gurgling in his throat. It is the point of this complex enterprise, the vivid moral of what is really a fable successfully disguising itself as a novel.

Yet the movie elides this moment, and Sherman eludes full confrontation with self and world. His escape from false conviction and imprisonment is played for smug comedy. The movie has no moral or dramatic weight, and that is a flaw that its makers seem to recognize. They have Sherman's judge (the estimable Morgan Freeman) step down from the bench and deliver to the camera a homily full of liberal-humanist piety. It is a dreadful ending, which manages to travesty all the tough-minded things Wolfe tried to say, and everything a movie unafraid of its own subject matter should have said.

By Richard Schickel

AWAKENINGS

For its first hour or so, this upscale heart tugger motors along familiar trails. A brilliant, humane neurologist (Robin Williams) bends the rules and manages to reach the neglected patients at a Bronx hospital. Dead souls spring to life. Minds dormant for decades must now adjust to sentience, and to the world that has grown 30 years older in an eyewink.

So far, so ennobling -- and predictable -- in director Penny Marshall's fidgety rendering of a case study by Oliver Sacks. But then the door of awareness starts to close on one patient (Robert De Niro). Worse, he can chart his gradual loss, as he never could earlier, when all was lost. He is now his own historian, recording the last sunset on the only world he knows. These scenes of decline mark a beautiful passage in an otherwise ordinary disease- of-the-wee k TV-style drama.

Count on Awakenings, written by Steve Zaillian, to mop up at Oscar- $ nominations time. Any movie about mental disturbance (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rain Man) is likely to touch Academy members, not so much because it treats a serious issue as because it parades the performer's craft. To watch De Niro shrink into the shadow of catatonia is to be made aware of his great gifts of body control, of withdrawing into character, of seeming to be. It's an awesome show that reveals more about De Niro than about the man he is playing. Like the Master Thespian on Saturday Night Live, he might be expected to snap out of his poignant lethargy and triumphantly shout, "Acting!" R.C.