Cinema: Hugs and Kisses

LAST EMBRACE

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Screenplay by David Shaber

Last Embrace is a film in which a stylish director and a superb cast (even the small parts are played by well-known and expert players, including Sam Levene, Charles Napier and Academy Award Winner Christopher Walken) do their best to triumph over a script that lacks witty writing and genuinely suspenseful substance. The result is a pleasant movie to watch, if your idea of a good time is an unelevated pulse, but one that leaves no lasting impression.

The story has its promising aspects. The protagonist (Roy Scheider, an actor who deserves something more than merely serviceable roles) is a shaky employee of the FBAP—the Federal Bureau of Advanced Paranoia, that usually unnamed, entirely fictional dirty-tricks agency that turns up with distressing regularity in recent movies. The reason Roy is shaky is that a bunch of baddies have killed his wife while aiming at him. Discharged from a rest home, he gets the strong impression that his bosses no longer have any use for him, and indeed we see them running his dossier through the paper shredder and deciding to do something very similar to his person. To compound his difficulties, a rather schizzy young woman (Janet Margolin) has mysteriously taken up residence in his apartment (her story of a mixed-up sublease does not wash awfully well). He is also in receipt of a death threat written in ancient Hebrew—not at all the form in which the Government generally drafts its pink slips.

Much running about ensues, as two forces stumble over themselves in their desire to dispatch Scheider. Like so many younger film makers today, Demme is generous in his implied homages to Hitchcock. His camera buzzes around like a mosquito looking for some place to draw blood. Maddeningly, the script offers a number of scenes that suggest an air of gathering menace, but it never quite manages to stitch them together into a tense line of force. Nor does it offer substitutes that can compensate for that defect—an off-the-wall characterization here, an unexpected plot twist there, a memorable line of dialogue somewhere else. This is a disappointment: Demme's last film, Handle With Care, abounded in all these qualities, even though it was complexly comic social commentary rather than a simple suspense story.

Still, there is a haunting and finally deadly darkness in the romantic entanglement between Scheider and Margolin. She is driven by a slightly implausible need to revenge wrongs done to her grandmother over half a century before. Even as he falls in love with her, it becomes interestingly possible that he may be the vic tim of her loony side too. Add in those neat acting cameos and Last Embrace is not a total loss. It is just that the movie is not all that it might have been or promised to be. The title implies a certain passionate intensity of approach, but all the film really manages is a diffident hug, a peck on the cheek.

—Richard Schickel