Cinema: Uneasy Riders and a Pig

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LOST IN AMERICA

Foolish fellows! If they had just waited a few years, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper could have been really Easy Riders. Instead of discovering America from the jolting seats of their motorcycles, they could have cruised along in the stolid comfort of an RV. With, maybe, the little woman fixing toasted cheese sandwiches in the microwave.

Perhaps nothing so clearly shows how times have a-changed since 1969 than the choice of vehicles David Howard (Albert Brooks) makes when, having been passed over for promotion at the ad agency, he decides to seek true values on the open road. Somehow he talks his wife Linda (Julie Hagerty), a straight arrow with several bent feathers, into risking all their capital on this trundle into self-discovery. Their itinerary, compared with that of their role models, is truncated and painfully mainstream. It consists largely of Las Vegas, where she loses their nest egg in a night, and Hoover Dam, where they have a marital wrangle the scope of which matches the backdrop. But never mind this minimalism. Brooks (who directed Lost in America and co-wrote it with Monica Johnson) is a shrewd, deadpan observer of the secret life of middle-class Americans. He likes to bring their dreams of glorious escape to life, let them taste their new world, then watch them scurry back to the comfortable and familiar. His comedy would be cruel if Brooks were not so good at playing the victims he concocts: so pompously thrilled as he rationalizes their lurches off the beaten track, so bone scared when things go awry. In Hagerty and Garry Marshall, the TV mastermind who plays a casino boss, he has glorious foils. Lost in America does not conclude; it merely ends, as if Brooks had run out of money or inspiration before he could think up a third act. But the year is unlikely to produce a funnier unfinished symphony.

LUST IN THE DUST

Divine is a female impressionist, not a female impersonator. His art begins with a taste for drag and ends with a squeaky voice. Since all things human are alien to him, he lacks both the affection and the understanding that might make his sexual satire work. Something similar might be said of his new vehicle. Director Paul Bartel and Writer Philip John Taylor neither know nor care enough about horse operas to spoof them well, although a few veterans of the form (Tab Hunter among them) know enough to keep their faces straight. The plot has to do with recovering a cache of lost gold, one-half of the map to which is tattooed to Divine's backside, one-half to Lainie Kazan's. The year's most resistible shot is the one that juxtaposes both parts of the chart. --R.S.

A PRIVATE FUNCTION