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One can almost hear this eager whisper down the corridors of Orion Pictures: "The Hotel New Hampshire could be the Tom Jones of the American '80s." Same director (Tony Richardson), same teeming fresco of endearing eccentrics, same Rabelaisian appetite for sex as the main course in the banquet of life, same giddy mixture of the farcical and the funereal, same pilfering of every silent-comedy trick from fast-motion camerabatics to actors who step out of character to wink knowingly at the audience.
Big difference, though. The domestic surrealism of John Irving's novel, a sort of tragicomic You Can't Take It with You, surrenders to the discipline of cinema narrative only after a struggle. His characters operate on obsession and whim ("I'm a grizzly bear!" "I've got to have sex with my sister!" "Hey, kids, let's all move to Vienna!") as the labyrinthine logic of Fate gives way to an author's caprice. On this Wild Mouse ride of moods and motives, Life goes on, Death comes in, windows open, options close. Try making a movie out of that.
Richardson, who also wrote the screen play, has tried his hardest to be both free and faithful to the story, and with considerably more brio than was displayed in the lamentable screen adaptation of Irving's previous book, the wondrous The World According to Garp. As in the synopsis-defying novel, the Berry family muddles through the mismanagement of a bunch of hotels, half a dozen dalliances and more than any family's rightful share of abrupt deaths. Trouble is, both the film and the characters are as preposterously buoyant as the giant balloon animals in a Thanksgiving Day parade. They rarely touch the earth, which makes it hard for them to touch a moviegoer's heart.
From among the large cast, many recruited from the New York stage, kudos goes to: Jodie Foster, sensibly raunchy as the eldest Berry child; Rob Lowe, as her brother, who registers the dreamy horniness of adolescence; Lisa Banes as the most tolerant of mothers in a patriarchal family; and Jennie Dundas as Lilly, the half-pint-size author for whom life is just too short. These attractive actors often come close to embodying Irving's mes sage: the adhesives of blood and affection can help even a weird family stick together like Velcro. —By Richard Corliss
MIKE'S MURDER
Most "overnight stars" have a few skeletons in their closets: low-budget movies made when they were struggling for attention, then exhumed by some fringe distributor trying to cash in on a brand name. Mike's Murder, which stars Debra Winger as a bank teller lured into the paranoia of the cocaine underworld, is a skeleton in a super-closet: the picture was made in 1982 between Winger's two big hits, An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment, and was perpetrated by James Bridges, the writer-director whose previous films include The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy. The pedigree of Mike's Murder matters not; this picture is a dog.