On Screen

...Don Ameche is uncannily effective as the fop, carefully combed-over receding scalpline and all...

...For although Howard clearly borrows a lot from his colleague, he also knows when to leave him behind...

...Although clues continually link the two stories, it is at the point where they dovetail that we first fully understand their unity: The curiously vitalizing balls are really cocoons, embryonic Antareans that Kitty and her friends have scooped up from the deep blue and placed temporarily in the pool...

...I suppose it was well-nigh inevitable that the film should end with 30 very long minutes of Spielberg-derived shenanigans...

...I wonder if they' II have fishing holes...

...runs the copy...

...Perhaps after Spielberg and Lucas and—may the extraterrestrials help us!—the step-cloned Joe Dante (Gremlins), no one wants a science-fiction picture that scales new heights...

...Indeed, Howard is what Steven Spielberg might be if someone would add a crucial dose of adult hormones to his milk (it is inconceivable that-E...

...Still, I wonder...

...The photograph shows a discreetly nude man leaning over on a bed, his body a double-exposed transparency reflecting the painted idyll on the wall to the rear...

...By all means see Cocoon...

...And take a gray-haired friend or relative with you...

...Meanwhile, back at the boat, Jack has been eying Kitty and trying to figure out what underwater bounty the venturesome group is seeking...

...Art, the dapper, slightly insipid philanderer, is shown doing a spot of break dancing that could put teenagers to shame—as if the aged suffered merely in their dexterity...

...When not squashed into the face and body masks of their human disguise, they look very much like cousins of the man in the furniture ad: faintly outlined, luminescent, with the promise of incorporeality...

...An instant later, Howard transports us to one of those well-scrubbed senior citizen complexes Florida abounds in...

...Next, the movie responds to the basic question in the affirmative: The Antareans specify that they can accommodate only 30 people 011 iheir spaceship, and (here is a rush 011 seats...

...Although Ben is capable of a certain amount of reflectiveness, that is more a consequence of Wilford Brimley's acting than of the script, and Ben's saying "men should be explorers, no matter how old" is largely an instinct, a gut feeling...

...Done to a higher standard, the film also would have managed a resolution without resorting to the by now hackneyed Flight From Human Intervention, including police helicopters and a winsome child who is on the side of the Aliens...

...whatever the case, the producers seem to feel it makes perfect sense—and cents—for Cocoon to deal with the tradeoff that is proposed by having it both ways, in a sense even three ways...

...Such abrupt juxtapositions of mood occur throughout the film and keep us on our toes by constantly throwing a wrench into our expectations...

...I suppose, too, that we cannot reasonably expect a popular, lavishly publicized movie to do anything except crouch to the level of an audience that American filmmakers have been persistently and profitably infantilizing for years...

...Were Cocoon a perfect instead of a charming movie, were it free to follow I he dictates of art rather than of Hollywood, I he dilemma it poses would have been sustained in some kind of filmic tension...

...David muses...

...Possibly its apparent absence in everyone else is a result of the film's emphasis on physical rejuvenation...

...One involves an odd quartet that charters a boat for deep-sea diving, consisting ofteenagers Kitty (Tah-nee Welch) and Pillsbury (Tyrone Power Jr...

...Doc (Mike Nomad) in his late '20s, and middle-aged Walter (Brian Dennehy...

...I attribute its freshness of spirit to Ron Howard's direction, and to the absolutely first-rate performers playing the three main couples...

...The director of Cocoon is 31-year-old Ron Howard, whose Splash made waves a year ago...

...Ben and his companions—and before long the entire old-age community—have recaptured thepow-ers of youthful virility by draining away the li fe force the cocoons had been gathering in the sea over millennia...

...Dour Bernie Lefkowitz had earlier been the one person at Sunny Shores who declined to take a dip in the magical waters...

...the other acknowledges them without sacrificing that sense of wishfulness—of "if only"— that most of us take to the grave...

...He soon gets more illumination than he knows how to handle: Spying on Kitty's bedtime disrobing, he watches as she transforms herself before his disbelieving eyes into A Creature From Another Planet...

...We're cheating nature," hesaid...

...Under a wearyingly bright Florida sky an unlikely sci-fi tale unfolds...

...The exception to the generally high level of acting is Steve Guttenberg, whose ev er-present, v acant grin begins to bore early on...

...you have already been lured into an anything-can-happen frame of mind...

...Let your dreams come true...

...Spielberg has always struck me as transfixedly childish in his enthusiasm for the Wonder Bread world of growing boys...

...Finally, Cocoon offers a negative assessment...

...Taken on its own terms (and it is a sign of how ample those terms are that one finds oneself wishing 20th Century Fox had dared to expand them just a trifle more), the film is gratifyingly different...

...One day the threesome discovers a few objects resembling oversized cantaloupes on the bottom of the pool...

...It may be simply a coincidence that a Jewish-looking actor with a Jewish-sounding name utters the sole moral judgments in the movie...

...Howard, by contrast, seems to have a genuinely child like sweetness of vision, a small but essential difference: One sensibility is happy to wholly ignore the dictates of maturity...

...This ismyhome," hedeclares...

...Now, grief-stricken over the death of his irritating yet beloved wife, Rose, he is set up as the character with the least to lose by leaving...

...He continues to show every sign of being at least as poised behind the cameras as he used to be in front of them, in his days as a child star on television...

...The movie asks—or better, successfully embodies—a quinlessential question: I f you could avoid "theplight man was born for," as Gerard Manley Hopkins described it, and achieve immortality in return for going to another planet and giving up the things and people of this world, would you make the exchange...

...Notwithstanding these defects, Cocoon is delightful...

...He is so convincing that one begins to suspect he has finally found a role that lets him play himself...

...Thus, to begin with the film diminishes the importance of the option in presenting it to men and women who, being aged and infirm, presumably have little to cling to on this planet...

...Well, sweet as that may be, it hardly meets the issue...

...Several couples just back from a group marketing trip are claiming their respective groceries...

...Released just in time to counteract the annual invasion of the mind-snatchers—the countless kiddie flicks that dominate summer box offices—it should bring the rest of us off the street and into the cool of the movie theaters, where we belong...

...The spot where the light hits the water immediately becomes alive, attracting a school of excited dolphins...

...Two stories are nestled inside the narrative of Cocoon, and initially they go their separate ways...

...His passengers, as it turns out, are Antareans and have come to earth on an important mission...

...The second plot follows the doings of some cronies at the Sunny Shores development who frequently sneak off to swim in the pool of a nearby deserted mansion...

...The prologue features all the effects that have been requisite for announcing the hushed onset of the Extraterrestrial Moment since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: Atonal choral music swells the soundtrack, and a glowing white light from Beyond irradiates the screen as it beams down upon the ocean...

...Nonetheless, he refuses to go on the Last Trip...

...Right at the start the film establishes its tone— half fantastic, half wry—by cutting from a numinous prologue to a comically prosaic opening scene (Howard used a similar device in Splash...

...Only later do Ben, Joe and Art realize that they have stumbled upon a literal Fountain of Youth...

...I fully expected a lone, briefly unclaimed box of cereal to reveal itself as Something Else, until the hopelessly senile Rose Lefkowitz (Herta Ware) was jostled into retrieving it by her glumly solicitous husband, Ber-nie (Jack Gilford...

...After examining this find, the men frolic as usual, but they depart from their swim like tomcats in heat, libidos aroused and muscles glowing...

...Watching these perfectly ordinary purchases being divvied up right after observing that extraordinary light source is faintly unsettling...

...The energizing force of those mysterious balls provides "rej-oo-ven' action," as a black resident of Sunny Shores puts it...

...Wiggling their way through a gap in the chain fence that surrounds the property, these delightfully delinquent grandpas still have the gumption to thwart authority...

...The boldest of them, Ben (Wilford Brimley), is a reliable signpost of a man with thickset shoulders and the sort of open countenance—framed by gold-rimmed spectacles and a drooping mustache—that makes him a natural leader...

...Thisiswhere I belong...

...T. 's creator drinks coffee...

...We travel well together," Walter explains to the laid-back, slightly skeptical young captain, Jack (Steve Gutten-berg...

...Cocoon, however, was financed and produced by a major studio in a society where a contemporary Candide might find his optimism stumped...

...His more slippery pals, Joe (Hume Cronyn) and Art (Don Ameche), are given to inappropriately youthful gestures...

...Bernie alone seems to possess the wisdom that compensates us for the indignities of growing old...

...You get a feeling of oth-erworldliness, of physical limits transcended, and the same feeling permeates Cocoon, lifting it aloft...

...A recent ad in various glossy magazines, part of a promotion touting a line of Italian lacquered furniture, suggests Cocoon's substance in a single image...

...I thought Maureen Stapleton and Jessica Tandy—as Ben's and Joe's wives, respectively—were somewhat wasted in bit parts, but they help us understand the distinct personalities of their husbands...

...They won't have grandsons, baseball games and hotdogs," Ben wistfully explains to his grandson David (Barret Oliver), telling the boy of the old people's secret plan to accompany the Antareans...