Srange Preppies

THE FILM ADAPTATION of John Irving's novel The Hotel New Hampshire starts off with all the promise of a New Year's Eve party--the right people (Jodie Foster, Nastassia Kinski and Beau Bridges are among the more illustrious members of the cast), the right settings, ranging from New Hampshire and Vienna to New York, and most important for New Year's Eve parties, and all other fantastic, the promise of illusion.

But despite one of the opening scenes in which a real live bear rides a motorcycle in circles round a high brow garden party, despite the beautiful surrealistic cinematography in which the New England landscapes are made to look like Maxfield Parrish illustrations, despite some truly good performances (Foster is one of the more forthright and appealing young actresses around) the movie falls as flat as stale champagne.

Director Tony Richardson's faithful adaptation of the living novel is perhaps the movie's greatest fault Irving's prose has a subtle ability to suspend reality and carry the reader smoothly along from one fabuluously bizarre episode to another: But seen on a 15 foot screen these same fabulous events have all the subtlety and appeal of Bozo the clown. For example, the movie's motto "Keep passing the open windows" (i.e. don't jump out) somehow sounds much less embarrassing and trite when you read it in the privacy of your own home than when you hear it blasted through Dolby stereo sound speakers every 10 minutes.

The movie begins cleverly with a story within a story as the father, Win Berry (Beau Bridges) tells his children once more how he and his wife first met. It is here that we are wisked away to a luxurious Maine resort in 1939 and here where we meet the bear, State o' Maine, riding a motorcycle. But all this ends too fast and we are back in the present (sometime in the late '50's) with Berry, his wife Mary (played competently but blandly by Lisa Banes) and their five children. The family lives in a rambling old New England house in the middle of nowhere with their grandfather Iowa Bob (Wilford Brimley). Berry and his father Iowa Bob both work at the nearby prep school. The Dairy School, where the three older children. Frank (Paul McCrane), Franny (Jodie Foster) and John (Rob Lowe), the narrator of the story, receive their dubious education.

While the Berrys may seem at first like your average preppy. New England family, this idea is abruptly dismissed as much too boring for the likes of this movie. For starters, Frank announces calmly that he is queer. But no one in his family seems to care, indeed Bridges' Win Berry is so distracted he appears to have had a lobotomy.

Franny and John are a little too close for comfort. Indeed their fraternal horsing around seems more like foreplay than wrestling. However, it is not until later on in the movie, when Fanny finally gives in to her brother's somewhat questionable desires that the two engage in a marathon afternoon of sex.

Lilly, the younger sister, stops growing after the age of eight, but this fact is never fully explained in the movie: it is only after reading the novel that we understand why no one raises an eyebrow when this little girl not only publishes a best selling novel, but also writes a screenplay to help her sister take revenge against a man who once raped her.

SOUND CONFUSING? ridiculous? baffling? The answer is all of the above and then some. The potpourri of a plot includes such juicy little scenes as a gang rape, several heart attacks to which the family responds with admirable aplomb, gay-baiting, and a flatulent family dog named Sorrow. Irving showed much foresight in naming this dog Sorrow. First, so that after the dog dies, is stuffed and falls out of an airplane into the sea, the earnest young narrator can say "Sorrow floats." Later on in the movie this useful beast is at the heart of another equally profound statement when our young narrator says mournfully, "Love also floats." The problem with the movie is that everything floats on the surface with nothing substantial enough to prevent us from drowning.

What little actual plot there is carries the family from New Hampshire where Win had given up teaching to start The Hotel New Hampshire, to Vienna where he and the children and his old friend confusingly named Freud start the second Hotel New Hampshire Permanent guests in this home lodge include terrorists, one of whom, Miss Carriage, played by Amanda Plummer, has a very peculiar accent, another who bears a suspicious resemblance to the prep school youth who raped Fanny, Susie the bear--Kinski dressed in a potbelly bear suit (why the sultry Kinski hides in such a suit is never satisfactorily explained), and a pack of German whores.

While the action of this movie may be too erratic to hold one's attention for long, it does look wonderful with brilliant shots of New Hampshire and Vienna. Lowe as the serious young narrator may be as about as convincing as a corpse but he does have a strange, androgynous quality that makes one keep thinking he'll say something interesting. Foster, who in spite of the pounds she's added since Taxi Driver, is still as appealing as ever.

In the end, without the strangely lyrical quality of Irving's prose. The Hotel New Hampshire becomes a series of disconnected vignettes that leave one feeling strangely isolated and dissatisfied--like drinking too much bad champagne.