Good Things in Small Packages

...More important than the physical resemblance is Busey's ability to convince us by the fierce intensity of his acting that he is Holly...

...On the other hand, both have enough redeeming features to make me want to "protect" them from their enemies as well as from their well-meaning, but ultimately destructive, friends...

...Still less distinguished is Anita Skinner, who manages to bring an almost self-conscious lack of grace to the role of Mayron's roommate...

...Weill and Polon also have an acute ear for the profound inanities that overeducated individuals use as a protection from, rather than an expression of, true feelings...

...Watch how Busey gratefully pulls off his clip-on bow tie while riding home with his parents in the family pickup truck after suffering through a hellfire and damnation sermon in the local church...

...He has done a lot of television...

...It is easy to make a legend of a famous person who dies so young (witness the cult surrounding James Dean...

...The most surprising performance, though, is given by Gary Busey as Holly...

...The Buddy Holly Story is a semific-tional biography of the rock-and-roll composer and singer whose meteoric rise to stardom was abruptly ended by his sudden death, at the age of 22, in a plane crash...

...With a flick of his wrist, he gives on-screen life to the entire Southern Baptist ethos...

...The actor omits, for example, the quavering falsetto that was the most distinctive feature of one of the singer's biggest hits, "Peggy Sue...

...Since the film was made in cooperation with and dedicated to Holly's widow and parents, one cannot help suspect that truth played a secondary role in comparison to the perpetuation of the Holly legend...

...Both are seriously flawed...

...Like Gary Busey, Claudia Weill is a newcomer to keep an eye on...

...When-as in The Buddy Holly Story-the truth of the performances greatly overshadows the sentimental falsification of the screenplay, questions of historical accuracy are rendered almost totally irrelevant...

...by Joel Fein, or the sanitized, sentimentalized script by Robert Gittler from a story credited to Alan Swyer...

...I first remember seeing .Stroud in the mid-'60s as Jimmy Rin-german, the escaped convict on the run from the sheriff (Clint Eastwood) in Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff...

...In these and other performances, Busey had cultivated the persona of a vacuously grinning, flaxen-haired, somewhat overweight farmboy-the paradigmatic bucolic slob...

...Specifically, it is saturated with that awkward sincerity some critics confuse with truthfulness...

...Nonetheless, Girlfriends has startling flashes of authenticity...

...Melanie Mayron, who played the hitchhiker in Harry and Tonto and the cashier in Car-wash, and who resembles one of Ed Koren's shaggy and lovable monsters in the pages of the New Yorker, is?well, shaggy and lovable, without being overly talented...

...Moreover, it deals with the not particularly dramatic relationship between two not particularly attractive women, and therefore manages in less than an hour-and-a-half to pack in every conceivable cliche of the post-Women's Liberation movie: the one-night stand, the traumatic abortion, the insensitive husband, the obligatory lesbian encounter, and so on...

...But Holly's contribution to popular music was real enough: Although he was on the charts for a mere three years (1956-1959), his synthesis of country-and-Western, blues and rock left its mark on musicians as varied as the Beatles and Linda Ron-stadt...

...I mention all this because what follows is a review of two small films: The Buddy Hotly Story and Girlfriends...

...Of course, truth in art does not mean historical accuracy...

...The day of that plane crash was not, as Don McLean was to write over a decade later, "the day the music died...

...On Screen GOOD THINGS IN SMALL PACKAGES BY ROBERT ASAHINA Although it is widely believed that a critic can quickly rise to fame and fortune by attacking one movie after another, the evidence suggests that the road to success lies elsewhere...

...The emergence of Susan Weinblatt (Mayron) from the complications of a "heavy relationship"-loving and intimate, but nonsexual-with her female roommate is described with a discerning eye for the petty desperations of young adults beginning their post-college lives...

...To boot, the story is told in an elliptical style that is a low-budget imitation of European filmmaking of a decade ago...

...Yet despite his wisely eschewing a note-for-note imitation, he manages somehow to capture Holly's creative spark...

...Consider the prominence of a feminist booster like Molly Haskell, or an everything booster like Judith Crist, or a completely undiscriminating essayist?critic" is an inaccurate label -like Penelope Gilliatt of the New Yorker...

...Apart from intermittent work on television, he seemed to have practically disappeared from view, so it is a pleasure to see that his once-promising film career has resumed...

...Only when the raison d'etre of an enterprise is to falsify the past in order to serve dubious ends in the present?as in American Hot Wax-Is one prompted to engage in nitpicking over a movie's verisimilitude...

...Put simply, Busey delivers the most arresting performance I have seen this year -more impressive even than John Travolta's similar triumph over his material in the banal Saturday Night Fever...

...to praise either without elaborate qualifications would be an act of critical bad faith...

...In this respect, Girlfriends bears a resemblance to Wendy Wasserstein's play, Uncommon Women and Others, another first work on a similar topic that similarly offered islands of insight amid seas of banality...

...In one scene, after a dressing room squabble with Holly, Jesse sullenly watches him pack his equipment...

...But the material here is interesting, if very limited...

...Earlier, he had made a vivid impression on the big screen as the younger brother of Junior Jackson (Jeff Bridges) in The Last American Hero...

...Even in the nonmusical scenes, one's eyes are riveted to Busey's infinitely expressive performance: His crooked country-boy grin, the wide gap between his buck teeth and his every gesture convey a wealth of visceral information...

...Such boosterism can be dismissed out of hand when it springs merely from ideology (feminist, auteurist, or otherwise), intimacy (since critics really should not become overly familiar with those whose works they must judge), or lack of knowledge...

...Unfortunately, Holly's memory is not well-served by the uninspired direction of someone named Steve Rash, the shockingly poor sound engineering (in a movie about a singer...

...in fact, he was one of the costars, with Jack Elam, of a short-lived series called The Texas Wheelers...

...But for the role of Holly, he seems to have lost about 30 pounds...

...But I sincerely hope that neither will be killed by kindness...

...Watching the confusing shifts in point of view and the arbitrary cutting (especially at the end, when the movie just stops, instead of reaching a conclusion), one gets the impression that Weill simply lacked the resources, financial and artistic, to make intelligible transitions or to provide the connective tissue that turns story skeleton into a movie...

...Yet this variety of "strategic behavior" can quickly become little more than an ancillary activity to the work of the studios' publicity offices: Nothing could please a publicist more than to have Pauline Kael take a small movie under her wing-as evidenced by the full-page, full-length reprints of some of her New Yorker columns as advertisements in the Sunday edition of the New York Times...

...Don Stroud does a strong job in the weakly conceived part of Jesse, Holly's drummer...

...The real difficulty arises when critics begin to feel a practically paternal (or maternal) interest in a movie's well-being...

...Weill seems not to have realized that all these meaningful moments have been preempted by slick commercial features like An Unmarried Woman and One Sings, the Other Doesn't...

...and as Hughey, the pimp and informant in Siegel's Madigan...

...Girlfriends, the first feature produced, written and coau-thored (with Vicki Polon) by Claudia Weill, a former documentary filmmaker and Sesame Street director, has all the strengths and weaknesses of a first creation...

...The acting in Girlfriends is not nearly as good...

...with his hair dyed and curled, and wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that were the singer's trademark, he bears an eerie resemblance to the gangly, spindly-legged Holly...

...There is, for instance, an almost understandable temptation on the part of "serious" critics to praise excessively the small virtues of small movies in an effort to insure that the films are not lost in the commercial hype generated by less discriminating but more influential reviewers for newspapers and mass magazines...

...This is an incredible accomplishment, especially considering that Busey, who does his own singing and guitar playing, does not sound like Holly...

...Stroud here manages-by saying a single word, "goodbye," when Holly leaves-to express the inarticulate frustration of a man who is more accustomed to communicating his feelings with his hands than with his words...

...No one, after all, could complain that The Birth of a Nation presents a historically inaccurate picture of Reconstruction...