Screen

...Nervous, tending to hysterics, perhaps more than a bit paranoid in the best of times, he has become facile and disciplined enough to be able to thrive in a field in which facility and discipline are valued more than talent...

...In fact, this movie about a group of homosexual friends devastated and reduced by AIDS, is partly moving and partly bland...

...Sean, a television writer of soap operas, is the sort of man who, as a child, was labeled "artistic" by perplexed and contemptuous adults...

...Davison uses a touch of effeminacy to garnish his characterization, bringing out the full flavor of David's strength and gallantry...

...When David becomes Sean's mainstay, the feyness doesn't disappear or unre-alistically turn into a pillar-of-strength sobriety...

...These aren't lives...

...With his stationary camera set back at a comfortable distance, he evokes relationships through the ways people sit, slouch, stand, or recline near or far from each other, do or don't touch, do or don't include the rest of the group in a remark intended primarily for one person...

...We want to emulate his quiet strength...

...They show the deterioration and disappearance of two men whose presences on screen were poignantly real to us long before they were stricken...

...That a film about men dying in considerable agony is so consistently light may disturb some who reflect upon the movie, but few will be disturbed while actually watching it...

...Pace, Papa...

...but why go on...

...Scriptwriter Craig Lucas is a conscientious dramatist who strives to show the growth of all his characters as AIDS changes their lives...

...Koop's painstakingly sane reports) asserts itself and he becomes a volunteer worker in the homes of AIDS patients, even delivering a speech urging one despondent patient to show a little spunk...

...David's crooning voice eases not only Sean's death but our own feelings...

...The entire performance is a life-enhancing evocation of a life dwindling into nothingness...

...Then, horribly, the later stages of his illness make him prematurely senile and, finally, beyond any communication save David's almost motherly crooning and caressing...

...What doesn't touch the heart is the death of a character who was created only to die, whose appearance in a drama immediately heralds his or her removal...

...All the other characters lack this reality...

...And he's heroic...

...No, David's almost ethereal daffiness grows, billows, serves as a self-administered tonic to keep himself going and as a balm with which he soothes his friend and eases him toward death...

...Furthermore, their fates display both the greatness and the puniness of human character under the shadow of death...

...But when a fictional character has been sentenced to death by its creator, we in the audience are entitled to ask, "Why should we be moved by the fate of this particular phantasm on whom the author inflicts imagined death...

...Of course, we ask this question only when we are not moved...

...They are mere constructions, in fact, not characters, strenuously willed onto the screen to illustrate aspects of the AIDS crisis...

...He has a talent for creating seemingly formless compositions that turn out to be dramatically cunning...

...Ironically, David, the leisure-loving, flippant, part-time drag queen is the latest avatar of that grace-under-pressure defined and exalted by the most notorious of homophobes, Hemingway...

...And it's not difficult to distinguish which parts work and which don't...

...Bruce Davison, as David, finally has a role worthy of his talent...

...But, whereas the changes in Sean and David seem to come out of mysterious depths that death has stirred, the younger characters might as well be wearing tags announcing their didactic functions...

...He makes David elegantly campy, wittily fey...

...The most surprising thing about Longtime Companion is that a harrowing disorder of the body and the body politic has instigated the making of a wistful and, yes, a pleasant movie...

...Some critics and audience members have found Longtime Companion bland while others have written and spoken of it as an intensely moving experience...

...He's catchy the way a tune is catchy...

...RICHARD ALLEVAICHARD ALLEVA...

...These are case history folders falling into file drawers...

...Is this an unmixed blessing...

...Willy's lover, Fuzzy, has a beard which gives him his nickname and which serves him as a characterization...

...Naturally, his better nature (or one of Dr...

...Longtime Companion is agony wrapped in Silk...

...The suspicion of AIDS at first aggravates Sean's natural hyper-sensitivity, making him worry about moles on his neck that have always been there, causing him to flare up at David, turning him teary-eyed and sulky...

...I would never have written iove nest,'" he sniffs...

...If we are moved, it is usually because the pain inflicted on the character both distills and heightens those qualities that were already interesting before misfortune struck...

...First he captures Sean's darting sensibility, then he shows the man's mind dying at nearly the same rate as his body...

...Even when individual characterizations don't register, director Norman Rene skillfully deploys his actors in group scenes of partying, lounging, hospital visits, ceremonies...

...We want to hear his voice say certain lines over and over...

...Willy is the Victim of Paranoia who fears even to touch one of his ailing friends for fear of infection...

...In one scene, Sean, his face acquiescent, friendly, and dim under the peak of a baseball cap, tries, with David's help, to have a professional exchange on the phone with a TV producer, without revealing the nature of his illness...

...Hence, the complaints of blandness...

...The terrible comedy Lamos finds in this scene would not be out of place in a Beckett play...

...Mark Lamos, a superb stage director and experienced stage actor, has a wonderful screen debut as Sean...

...Later, as the disease actually takes hold and friends comfort and support him, Sean becomes calmer, almost resigned, quite tolerant of the psychobabble offered by a sincere but silly acquaintance...

...Yet he has enough of an artist's pride in his work to assure friends watching an episode he has written that an actress's corny exit line "I'll leave you two in your little love nest" is the performer's invention, not his...

...One of Davison's boldest strokes is to keep his voice high and flutey even in the most heartbreaking scene in the movie: Sean's death, the only successful deathbed scene since Garbo's Camille...

...The way Rene works, an arm reaching over the back of a couch to touch a shoulder or to clasp a hand can evoke half a lifetime of unstrained affection...

...All the scenes that deal with the middle-aged couple, Sean and David, are intensely moving...

...As for The Actor with Aids who finds his contract canceled...