On Screen

...Watching it jump all over the place —from the beige-on-beige, magaziney LA house of Daulton's parents to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico and back to the whirring RTX office— is a cinematic high: This is the way movies are supposed to look and feel...

...Honor, patriotism, revenge, corruption, idealism, naivete—these are merely some of the motifs flung at us in the course of two hours...

...anything hedoesn'tknowhebluffs...

...Had the plot been entirely made up, the movie could have been called a fable, a hypothesis about what might happen in a certain set of circumstances...

...Boyce's childhood pal, having taken a divergent path of his own, is exactly the kind of desperate character to fall in with the money-making scheme of his brilliant yet brittle friend...

...Lee, combining ingenuousness and bravado, makes his overtures to the KGB by walking into the Soviet embassy in Mexico City...

...Enter Daulton Lee...

...His new colleagues, a black man and a white woman, initiate him into the daily routine: dope smoking, mixing margaritas in the ice machine (an ingenious abuse), playing the radio loud, and working as little as possible...

...One is its featherbrained approach to the issues it purports to confront...

...Christopher is apprehensive, yet he realizes Daulton needs the validation he alone can provide...

...his descent into ever darker, deeper waters is heartrending and riveting...

...In an odd way, Lee is the more forgivable of the two criminals—a penitent who lacks any sense of salvation except to sin again...

...He is as volatile and vulnerable as Boyce is cool and composed, all manic energy— a coked-up, fast-talking pawn in a deadly contest that is beyond him in every way...

...If screenwriter Steve Zaillian or director John Schle-singer had bothered to figure out where home base is, and whose view of things is meant to be the umpire's, we might have enjoyed a few genuinely rousing innings of ideological hardball...

...This confusion isn't Hutton's fault, of course...

...To begin with, it clearly has loftier aspirations than providing sheer entertainment...

...And why do all of his colleagues appear to love him, since he never seems anything other than aloof...

...Eventually the Soviets want to inspect the genius in the wings...

...I know he's supposed to be the young Henry Fonda incarnate...

...The story revolves around Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Daul-ton Lee (Sean Penn), boyhood friends in Southern California who attended religious school together...

...On Screen BABES IN SPYLAND BY DAPHNE MERKIN The Falcon & The Snowman is one helluva mixed-up movie, but from the wide and powerful opening aerial shots you know you are being programed to regard it as big, even serious in its intentions...

...To his surprise, the new office is so laid-back it could be a college dorm...

...His veryflakiness, though, inspires the Russians to take him seriously: This burnt-out character is exactly the type they expect to be bred by a decadent superpower...

...The time is the 1970s, mid-Watergate and pre-yuppie...

...Boyce is incensed by what he considers his country's corrupt meddling and forms the idea of passing this secret information along to the Communists...

...He is dazzlingly good, reminiscent of the preglacial Robert DeNiro...

...His curiosity piqued, Boyce follows the next series of dispatches closely and comes upon U.S...

...plans to back a coup in Argentina aimed at unseating its president, a Leftist...

...Perhaps we are meant to see Christopher as a clever sociopath, an affectless whiz kid...

...Sean Penn is the movie's one unmixed virtue...

...Probably the three women sitting near me in the theater, who earnestly agreed that Boyce was the real hero, an idealist without a country, and that the pathetic Lee was the real villain, were thinking precisely what Schlesing-er wanted them to think...

...Timothy Hutton, among my least-favorite rising stars, plays Christopher Boyce as a petulant loner, un-fathomably hostile beneath his good-boy facade...

...To carry out his plan, he needs a courier, a person who can approach the KGB and tell its operatives about the goldmine of revelation awaiting its opened pocket-book...

...Nonetheless, the trouble remains: The Falcon & The Snowman is not simply a well-done thriller, an updated Spy Who Came in from the Cold...

...Most of the missives that arrive on the tape are summarily destroyed in the paper shredder, receiving scarcely a second glance—until Christopher chances to notice a misrouted communique detailing CIA-related activities...

...My interpretation—and I'm not sure it is the one Schlesinger wants us to draw —is that The Falcon & The Snowman is a cautionary tale depicting a uniquely American symptomatology, the byproduct of a society democratic enough to spawn doubts and negligent enough to ignore those doubts when they turn malign...

...The complexity of Penn's acting helps us perceive the emotional havoc—the urge to be effective, like Boyce—that leads Lee into delusionary, "heroic" roles...

...Christopher's father (Pat Hingle), a well-meaning, intrusive former FBI agent, gets his son a job as a gopher in a top-level government communications project called "RTX...

...at the enraged Christopher, Daulton appears to be both a dangerous child and an endangered would-be adult...

...Schle-singer, a very poised director with a sure hand on the controls, knows how much high-tech stuff to give us—Boyce bent over his decoding labors—before cutting to a picturesque moment—Boyce shopping in Venice, bumping into a pretty girl (the gangly, loose-jawed Lori Singer...

...While Boyce stays in the background, deciphering the codes and raising the price on each successive delivery, Lee is in the open...

...Soon Christopher's discretion and technical aptitude bring him a promotion to a confidential position as a message decoder...

...If you are willing to overlook such annoyances, however, the film is enjoyable as a thriller...

...Youdon'thaveto fall into the trap of condoning him to feel forced to regard his frenzied search for self-esteem—first by using and selling drugs, then by joining his admired friend's scheme—as all too human...

...it's the script's...

...In that case it makes little sense to burden him as well with the whole of whatever moral message the film has to offer...

...Christopher is first glimpsed at a crucial moment of disillusionment: He has just made the decision to abandon his studies for the priesthood at a Jesuit seminary—his initial step toward the cynicism that will engulf him and send him into foreign arms...

...During his meeting with the KGB he belatedly finds that the Russians are no more innocent than his fellow-countrymen...

...Scuzzy as Daulton Lee is, Penn draws our empathy and interest...

...Not for me...

...But the narrative is not fiction—these events really occurred, creating a need for meaning and a larger interpretation...

...Observing how Hutton's scrunched-up face and tiny eyes always settle into a smug expression even where he's supposed to be angry or terrified, I felt nothing but increasing disdain toward his character...

...The Falcon & The Snowman has several weaknesses...

...Indeed, had the movie chosen to focus on this psychological disparity and examined the difference in motivations, instead of only hinting at it, The Falcon & The Snowman might have found firm footing...

...The product of a better-off, less close-knit family than Christopher, Daulton has become a small-time drug dealer and a big-time drug taker...

...He also begins to fear surveillance, but when he tries to end the transactions Lee threatens to re veal them to his super-patriot father...

...When, legs teetering, voice cracking and eyes sluggish from cocaine he bleats, "Throw me to the wolves...

...Based on the book by Robert Linsey that was itself based on one of the unlikelier espionage cases to break in recent years, the film doesn't hesitate to grapple with "issues...

...Being a steely pragmatist rather than a gentle idealist at heart—his passion is training falcons, not a hobby suited to the fainthearted—he decides to add the insult of profit-taking to the injury of spying: He will not simply give the CIA satellite codes away, he will sell them...

...Another is its almost insultingly knee-jerk depiction of the reasonable, good-humored Russians (David Suchet is especially debonair in the role of Alex, the KGB conduit) versus the bullheaded, paranoidAmericans (when the FBI finally arrests the turncoats at the Los Angeles airport enough agents are deployed in full combat uniform to fight a small war...

...In addition, the political and social implications are unavoidably present by dint of the story line...

...Somewhere in his scrambled but not inhuman mind (the opposite of his more intellectually gifted accomplice's lucid but pathologically aloof one), Lee actually imagines that he will prove his mettle and win the esteem of his perennially disapproving parents by executing this dangerous mission...

...In some respects, in fact, the fast-pacedFalcon, set to a with-it soundtrack of David Bowie, Procol Harum and the like, is a positively snazzy piece of movie-making...

...Be that as it may, once the two team up the pieces of the plot fall easily into place...

...to Lee, it is a test of his personal acceptability...

...Certainly, the material is heavyweight stuff...

...Flying back and forth between California and Mexico in a drugged daze, his hair an unruly mat, his clothes those of a beachcomber, Lee is an impossible spy...

...Shortly thereafter—to my mind, at an astonishingly late point in the game—the two are tracked down, brought to trial and convicted...

...Although it is Hutton/ Boyce who voices the few overt political statements intended to explain the conspiracy—"we're the only ones who used the atom bomb," he notes, besides speaking of " the extent of the deception, of the lie" (presumably the CIA's)— everything he says sounds pious...

...Through a fatal linking of external happenstance and internal pressures, they end up selling official secrets to the Soviet Union...

...In contrast to Boyce, Lee never makes ideological claims on behalf of his spying...

...To Boyce, the enterprise is a test of cunning...

...He pitches the goods at them like the smoothest used car salesman...

...not counting on Boyce's total lack of interest, they hope to seduce him into fulltime espionage...

...he merely points to his own desires: money, and a wish to do something that will gain him his parents' attention...

...If the funhouse at RTX is typical of the current state of American security, leaks must be common as holes in Swiss cheese...

...Certainly someone ought to have noticed Boyce's machinations sooner...

...As it is, we get a jumble: half disinterested cultural reportage (the picture's text) and half unexamined liberal cant (its subtext...