

Fine Acting Not Enough To Overcome Silly Premise Of `Boys'

May 10, 1996|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie critic.

Romantic movies often are better when they weave in a little humor, sauciness and angst. But if the balance gets knocked askew, as it does in Stacy Cochran's "Boys," the film can wind up seeming screwy or half-baked, no matter how much talent went into it.

"Boys" is a strange, sometimes affecting little picture with a cock-eyed sounding premise. It's about a malcontent senior at a Maryland boarding school who discovers an unconscious woman and makes her his secret guest. The woman is reckless Patty Vare (Winona Ryder), victim of a horse-riding accident, who has some mysterious problems with the police. The guy who revives her and hides her in his dorm room is John Baker Jr. (Lukas Haas), a rebellious preppie.

When Baker sneaks Patty into his digs at the Sherwood School for Boys and keeps her there, after she explains why she can't go home, they end up causing a campus furor. One by one, Baker's dorm-mates, and eventually most of the school, find out there's a mystery babe on the premises. Inevitably, the roommates-by-accident begin to turn each other on.

Two kinds of stories are operating in "Boys": a fantasy about a misfit hiding a sleeping beauty in his dorm room and a mystery about Patty's activities on the night before Baker finds her. (We get the second story -- an explanation of why she's so fearful of the cops -- through flashbacks.)

By the end, though, with the romance resolved and the mystery cracked, "Boys" shoots off in another crazy direction that makes little sense -- unless the producers are vainly hoping for a sequel. All in all, it's a silly-sounding idea: a sort of love-on-the-run story that hasn't quite started.

Yet, at the beginning, "Boys" almost works. Preposterous as the central premise is, Cochran -- whose debut feature was the offbeat 1992 feminist comedy "My New Gun" -- is able to pump plausibility into it. She understands the trick to making wish-fulfillment stories. Instead of staging absurd reactions to an absurd situation, she has her characters react realistically to every fix in which they find themselves.

While the movie is rolling along, the actors engage us, particularly Ryder and Haas, two unusually photogenic ex-child stars who strike more than the usual sparks. Haas does Baker with a mixture of the slightly slick sensitivity you might find in a picture like "Dead Poets Society" and a welcome touch of gentle, wry mockery. Ryder plays a more difficult, almost existential part: a woman hiding almost everything while trying frantically to puzzle out her own life. And though the actress never really makes total sense out of Patty, at least she keeps the role interesting.

Cochran, smartly, doesn't play the story for goofball sex farce. Her approach is more low-key and subtle. She has an excellent eye and a top-flight cinematographer (Robert Elswit) and production designer (Dan Bishop). And "Boys," at its best, has a fine romantic nervousness, comic tension and perceptive take on the suffocating but strangely comforting traps of its private-school, affluent-suburban environments.

Cochran is especially good with the boys. In less sure hands, Baker's dorm-mates (played by Wiley Wiggins, Russell Young, Charlie Hofheimer, Spencer Vrooman and Christopher Pettiet) might have been the usual gang of mugging teen-movie doofuses. But Cochran is able to endow them with some individuality and color, to give the movie, for at least two-thirds of its length, some tension and humor.

But gradually, "Boys" begins to disintegrate. It's especially shaky in the scenes near the end involving Patty's and Baker's parents. Either through cutting, misemphasis or bad writing, the parents (all played by good actors who should probably be absolved of blame) slide into the caricaturish dead-ends the kids avoid. Is the movie making a point about the aging process? That, as we grow older, we turn into villains or cliches? If so, it's either the wrong movie or the wrong point.

And the ending, which plays like it might have been the product of a focus group or brainstorming session, almost wipes your fondest and scariest memories of this film clean, as if you'd fallen off the horse along with Patty. "Boys" was inspired by the James Salter short story "Twenty Minutes," which centers on the woman and the accident and never takes us to Sherwood. The movie might have been better if it had never left Sherwood -- and if everyone involved had forgotten the formulas of the love-on-the-run story.


(star) (star) 1/2

Directed and written by Stacy Cochran; based on the story "Twenty Minutes" by James Salter; photographed by Robert Elswit; edited by Camilla Toniolo; production designed by Dan Bishop; music by Stewart Copeland; produced by Peter Frankfurt, Paul Feldsher and Erica Huggins. A Touchstone Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:29. MPAA rating: PG-13.





Officer Kellogg Curry .................... John C. Reilly

Officer Bill Martone ..................... Bill Sage
