Call in The Smarm Police!

THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE

DIRECTOR: MEL GIBSON

WRITER: MALCOLM MACRURY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Bitter man meets troubled boy with predictably uplifting results.

The title is a misnomer. Justin McLeod does not lack a face. His problem is that he has two of them. His right profile has been grossly disfigured in an auto accident, but the opposite side is pure Mel Gibson, handsome and, you'll be relieved to know, getting most of the screen time. It symbolizes, pretty obviously, a deeper split in his personality, the unmarked side representing the idealistic young teacher he once was, the twisted side the bitter recluse he has become.

It is a 13-year-old adolescent, Chuck Norstadt (Nick Stahl), who helps him reconcile his two selves. He's a kid so screwed up that he actually wants to go to military school. You can't really blame him though, since his mother (Margaret Whitton, in a good performance) has an unfortunate propensity for marrying inappropriate men on what seems to be an almost annual basis. Unable to deal with a family that keeps extending itself in such a careless way, Chuck is a little bit bifurcated himself, falling into dreamy spells to escape the hubbub. Lacking a reliable father figure, he tells himself that regimentation will make a man of him. All he has to do is pass that entrance exam, and that's where McLeod, inhabiting a gloomy mansion in the Maine resort town where Chuck and family are vacationing, comes in. Pretty soon McLeod is talking out of both sides of his mouth -- a stern taskmaster one minute, an indulgent mentor the next -- and little Chuck is flourishing in the company of the first grownup male who has ever taken him seriously.

Deep bonds are forged. Prejudice is fought (the town, which has always treated McLeod as a geek, mistakes pedagogy for pederasty). Wounds are finally healed. And the sentimentally impressionable will have a good cry as outcasts assert their humanity and teach the smug and the hypocritical a thing or two about simple decency.

Mel Gibson, directing for the first time, presents this deeply wet material in a reasonably cool and dry manner. But his film is in desperate need of smarm busting -- something, anything that would relieve the familiarity of its characters, the predictability of its structure, the bland failure to challenge its perfect correctness of outlook.