SCREENING ROOM

BY FRANK PITTMAN

Once upon a Time in the Summer

At last, some fairy tales for adults

Thirty years ago, with Jaws, Steven Spielberg showed Hollywood how to attract teenage boys to the multiplex when their brains are on vacation. He introduced the "summer movie"--a primitive and childish entertainment that pumps high levels of testosterone into the audience, while regularly timed explosions keep them awake amidst all the throwaway dialogue. Ever since, would-be summer filmgoers past the age of 19 have dared not venture into this "no adults admitted" land of fireworks and simplistic plots, with the familiar, reassuring emotional content of adolescent fantasies and fairy tales. Much of the message of these movies comes down to an assurance that reality will bow to the hero, if he's heroic and courageous enough, to the heroine, if she's beautiful and loyal enough.

This summer's box-office lottery winner was Spielberg's relentlessly noisy War of the Worlds, which offered us a fable about a worthless man becoming a hero simply because his children are fed up with him and noisily confront him. As is routinely the case in fairy tales, the story is told from the perspective of the child. The infantile father is played by Tom Cruise, an endlessly energetic actor with a cocky face and a gymnast's body.

 Cruise has an extraordinary ability to project intensity and high energy, which works well as long as you don't look into his empty, desperate eyes. In War of the Worlds, he plays a divorced longshoreman who's an insensitive father to his two kids--a teenaged son (Justin Chatwin), who feels only contempt for his "old man," and a clinging, 10-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), who keeps him alert and under voice control with her relentless screams. Spielberg shows us how this middle-aged adolescent of a father needs a crisis to grow up.

Cruise's crisis comes when aliens take over New Jersey. All earthly power and machines (except for Cruise's car!) fail. He and his kids find themselves alone amidst a mob of frantic strangers, some of them armed, who are facing the end of the world. Giant, tripodal people-zappers rise up from beneath the pavement and knock down buildings. The scene looks shockingly like 9/11.

Cruise tries to get his kids to their mother and stepfather, but soon realizes, to his horror, he's the only adult on duty. Using the few talents he has, he runs and fights, with his screaming daughter in his arms, from New Jersey to Boston. In constant motion and with minimal dialogue, Cruise looks great, and Spielberg is careful to keep him from gazing too directly into the camera. Photographed mostly from the side, he doesn't try to act or express much emotion, beyond an occasional moistening of his eyeballs. It's only when he encounters a crazed Tim Robbins, as an armed-to-the-teeth survivalist in a basement, that we begin to appreciate how well Cruise is playing a competent, responsible, slow-thinking, grown man.

But the movie is so loud and frenzied it's practically unbearable to watch, and, with Fanning's shrieking it's absolutely unbearable to hear. Also, these aliens look too much like those from Close Encounters to scare us nearly as much as the gun-toting mobs of paranoid survivors. We've met the enemy and he's irresponsible fathers like Cruise and trigger-happy victims like Robbins.

The great film of the summer is Cinderella Man, which has a similar Dad the Hero theme as War of the Worlds, but is told from the perspective of the father, as he tries to decide whether to risk his life for the children he can't support otherwise. Instead of sporting fantastic trappings, the world in which this story is told is deadly realistic. And the story itself is true. Instead of the expected audience of appreciative grown-ups, it drew an audience of practically nobody. (I've heard it'll be rereleased in October after its faltering opening in June. Wherever you can find it, it's a must-see movie. The story is real, and so are the emotions it inspires.)

Cinderella Man was made by director Ron Howard, who's found heroism in characters as disparate as a psychotic mathematician (Russell Crowe) in A Beautiful Mind and an astronaut armed with duct tape in Apollo 13 (Tom Hanks). Here, Howard's subject is real-life heavyweight boxer Jim Braddock, played by Russell Crowe as heavily muscled, a little simpleminded, and far more convincing than his portrayal of brilliant mathematician John Nash in Beautiful Mind. In 1932, Braddock was a heavyweight contender with a wife, three children, and a broken fist. He lost a fight, went to work on the docks, and ended up going on welfare and losing his children. His comeback a few years later was one of those tear-wrenching legends that, Howard would have us believe, got us through the Depression.

The first half of this film is about the hardships and everyday privations faced by Braddock and his family. Much of the focus is on the fighter's courageous and feisty wife, Mae (Renee Zellweger), who holds the family together as the surprisingly soft-spoken Braddock loses hope, but maintains his values and his determination not to give up his children (even as they freeze when the heat and lights are cut off). In one scene, the oldest of the starving children steals a bologna sausage. In a memorable moment of fatherly integrity, after he's taken the boy and the sausage back to the butcher, Braddock firmly tells his son, "In our family, we never steal--no matter what."

When he unexpectedly defeats a top contender as a last-minute replacement for an injured fighter, Braddock begins an unlikely comeback that leads to a fight with champion Max Baer, a Hollywood-ish narcissist who's already killed two men in the ring. The last half of the film follows Jim as he decides what he'll risk, what he'll do for his family, and what happens when he takes the chance he must take. The worship and adulation of this man with an iron will and no ego is awesome, as audiences in the stadium and churches across the country watch the fight.

With his massive, furrowed brow and deep, shamed eyes, Crowe has Anthony Hopkins' startling range and Burt Lancaster's physically imposing presence. Here, he's worthy of adulation, even if not emulation, as a humble bull of a man doing whatever a man's gotta do--short of stealing. Never for a moment do we forget that Braddock is doing what a man's gotta do for the sake of his children, and never for a moment does he tell them so. This is a fairy tale, but set in reality and told from the adult perspective. This is what it feels like to be a father.

Howard throws in a courageous and loyal wife who turns her husband into a hero with her love and backbone, as he did with Kathleen Quinlan in Apollo 13 and Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind. Unfortunately, Zellweger, once so adorable, has become an embarrassment of tics and twitches. Nevertheless, her big scene, when she herself goes into battle with Baer and Braddock beams adoringly, and is over the top--but damned if it doesn't work.

Crowe's supportive manager is devilish smart-ass Paul (Sideways) Giamatti, a man who's also gambling everything on this bout, and who truly believes in the big guy's ability to go beyond what anyone ever thought he could do. The scenes between the two men are electric, as the chubby little Giamatti transfers his will and intelligence to the animal power of the fiercely hulking Braddock.

The boxing, which is magnificently staged and filmed, is so painful and bloody it may repulse audiences. Ostensibly about boxing, the film is, in fact, an inspirational love-fest about the nature of heroism and family life in hard times. Small children may still believe that fathers--like comic-book heroes--are born for the job. But a guy doesn't have to grow up very far to realize that if he's to be the hero, like Tom Cruise or Jim Braddock, he must rise to the occasion through an act of will and dedication.

All heroes aren't flamboyantly physical. Little old ladies can also be heroic, as demonstrated in the loveliest movie of the year, Ladies in Lavender, filmed by the subtle actor Charles (Plenty) Dance. Ladies in Lavender is the film (and film title) least likely to attract teenaged boys to the movies this summer. It's a tale that bears some resemblance to such delicate classics as Babette's Feast and Billy Elliot.