Weekend Entertainment Guide

MOVIES . . . TOUCH: Writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's 'Touch' is the story of Juvenal, a Christ figure who has adapted to the modern era. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts to drift out of the rehab center where he has taken refuge. Among his would-be exploiters are a sometime revivalist (Christopher Walken), now reduced to selling used RVs and aluminum siding; a Catholic fundamentalist (Tom Arnold), prepared to enforce a return to the Latin Mass, at gunpoint if necessary; a dubious record promoter (Paul Mazursky), worried that Juvenal wont tour like the Pope does; a star biographer (Janeane Garofalo), looking for the inside gossip; and, of course, the TV host (Gina Gershon), half smarm, half snarl. "Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead," says TIME's Richard Schickel. "Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But 'Touch' was never meant to be 'Get Shorty.' It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective. "