'Creator' Botches Formula

ON PAPER, in some frenzied script development office, Creator could have been a good film--at least a bearable one. The idea of an eccentric scientist trying to clone his long dead wife bounces like a solid premise for a light comedy. Similarly, the tension in the film between God as reasonable and Reason as god might have been engaging, like the crunch of cold modern science and warm timelessly-fashioned love. And the acting of Peter O'Toole, who worked similar magic in The Stunt Man, should have been able to sustain the tension between the comic and philosophical elements in the character of the tastefully crazed academic.

But Creator is definitely a movie not meant to be. For the first ten minutes, the movie accurately portrays the strange environs of scientific research, and Peter O'Toole is marvelous as a mildly comic, Einstein-like scientist. David Ogden Stiers of MASH fame sounds good without his aristocratic air as O'Toole's ruthless rival. But then the Jeremy Leven screenplay begins its long plummet in quality of dialogue, and the less dazzling supporting cast intrudes..

It is difficult to distinguish where the bad lines end and the bad acting begins. For example, even with his best effort, O'Toole could not sustain the overly-profound weight of an endless series of cliches on life, the universe, and everything that he is commanded to deliver. On the other hand, Mariel Hemingway's pathetic Madonna Wanna-Be portrayal of O'Toole's would-be fiancee is surely worse than what any amount of bad dialogue could explain away. And for lingering, breathless male fans of Star 80, take a deeeeeep breath: Hemingway isn't even looking good.

THE WORST SCENES are certainly those in which the younger characters tell their problems to O'Toole. Their difficulties thump like so many case studies from everyone's favorite bearded Viennese couch-keeper, with the lifelessness ordinarily confined to pre-pubescent diaries. O'Toole's answers whisper forth with the naive, 60's-style moral rhythm of Jonathan Livingston Seagull without the ocean breeze.

EARLY AND LATE ON, character transitions take place randomly and at blinding speed, like the rapidly escalating relationship between Boris, O'Toole's young assistant, and the fair co-ed Barbara. Then, after the destruction of the initial premise by the villainous Stiers, the plot divides itself into so many branches that by movie's end, there is no resolution of plot or character--no perfect ending to be revealed by some bad movie critic. The minor miracle at film's end is merely the impossible cap to an implausible development of character and situation, something only a cute ET could pull off.

Surely, this movie, which manages to make the miraculous seem trite and the spiritual seem silly, deserves the full wrath of the Creator whose name it bandies about so much. No doubt, but that this Creator will be destroyed in the box office, that most merciless repository of Man's (Hollywood Man's) Judgment on earth.