On Screen

...The words that came to my mind were: airless, stagnant, unfailingly well-meaning...

...The film ends, significantly, with Cyril, his mum and Shirley on the roof of their building, watching the sunrise after having returned from a terrible fight with Val and Martin...

...We are not inspired, we're deadened...

...The title itself is ironic, since Cyril and Shirley profoundly feel the absence of a hopeful future, and it is through their eyes that we view King's Cross as representative of the land of their diminished alternatives...

...TV audiences will be able to judge Rachel River for themselves in June...

...Like other features funded or partially supported by public broadcasting's American Playhouse and Robert Redford's Sundance Institute (a developmental think-tank for liberal filmmakers), this one pumps up its subject with respectability but then drains it of vitality and punch...

...Cyril and Val finally exchange unkind words when mum is accidentally locked out of her home and must appeal to her neighbors for help...

...High Hopes introduces to American viewers a writer-director who brings something new and unsententious to his stories of people with limited options...

...High Hopes was produced in part by Channel Four, Britain's visionary television channel...

...Val is always too busy spending money on every brass-plated gewgaw she can find for her flat, while Martin enjoys knocking up his little bit of rough when Val is not looking...

...Cyril and Shirley, in addition, bear an unfair share of the obligation to keep watch on Cyril's mother (Edna Dore...

...In one key scene, Cyril and Shirley visit the grave of Karl Marx, on whose stone is written, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways...

...It provides further evidence that Margaret Thatcher's Britain has helped to createachorus of stylish outrage among its younger filmmakers, who over the past decade have produced a body of work that has come to define new British cinema...

...The scene isn't exactly cheerful, but these three, alert and relaxed, are happy to be together, and it is in such warmth that High Hopes' charms reside...

...It keeps them bundled up against the chill and makes them intensely interdependent...

...A used-up, worn-out pensioner who lives nearby, she apathetically takes her medicines and doles out moments of warmth before the electric fire...

...Perhaps because they have an eye cast toward their films' eventual broadcast on PBS, they become victims to the self-censorship of "good taste" gently imposed by public television...

...People there aren't just related by blood or marriage but by the cold, aloof winter landscape...

...The film revolves around its characters—prying them open to examine their politics, their sense (or lack) of compassion and letting them demonstrate what they are able to do and what is beyond their means...

...The film bids us think Big Thoughts—spiritual uplift, social concern, rural dignity...

...For all its good intentions, RachelRiveris symptomatic of its producers' failure to create vital films from the small, intimate subjects it chooses to focus on...

...In remains a curiosity why so many American Playhouse theatrical films (Stacking, Stand and Deliver, and Waiting for the Moon are other notables) aren't very much better...

...A double comic twist keeps the scene from being doctrinaire...

...The point here is that Cyril and Shirley can't really change a thing, that they're stuck being philosophers...

...at 3 5 he is afraid things aren't going to improve...

...Cyril and Shirley's afternoon outing to Marx's grave is depicted as a low-income couple's "cheap date"—a politically slanted variation, if you will, on taking a Sunday afternoon ride on the Staten Island ferry...

...Leigh's film, much like My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Brezhnev, is a response to a Britain that has largely dispensed with most kinds of basic family feelings, community responsibilities, or collegiality in the workplace...

...The whole tone is too tasteful and too enervated...

...Leigh, wellknown to London theatergoers since 1968 for his West End and Royal Court productions, has also been directing what is acclaimed as some of the best British television never seen in the United States...

...Woolly, bearded and clearly a '60s back number, Cyril is scared of getting bitter...

...Needless to say, they scarcely let Cyril's mother in the door...

...You don't want to patronize these people—some of the performances, by Pamela Reed and Viveca Lindfors, among others, aren't bad—but they keep heaving sighs and they keep saying things like, "This is one strange and dismal world we' re living in.' Can that possibly be the best country wisdom available nowadays...

...Black comedy no longer quite describes it...

...Last year's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is emblematic of the genre...

...And a reclusive old woman dies in her poky, unheated cottage, with a rumored fortune hidden somewhere on the property, stirring up the overlapping suspicions of the townspeople...

...Rupert (David Bamber) and Laeticia (Leslie Manville) are smartly dressed and shellacked, unyielding, uncharitable, and murderously condescending—two pickled yuppies who fox-trot through life reinventing the stuffiest, most classbound conventions of the Empire's upper crust...

...It is gratifying when they are attracted to literary subjects otherwise ignored by the mainstream, such as the violent gothic meditations of James Purdy's In a Shallow Grave, but frustrating when the quirkiest and most provocative of them all, Joyce Chopra, is met with controversy over Smooth Talk because of its danger-ridden erotic tension...

...An American effort to raise film standards through linkage with public television, Rachel River, is by contrast painful...

...In trying to offer American moviegoers an up-market alternative to the kiss-kiss-bangbang that is the major studios' bread and butter, these filmmakers, many of them young and emerging from extensive television experience, tend to be more concerned with giving movies a good name than with invigorating their material with style and movement...

...Leigh really has wicked fun with this pair, indulging every urge to turn them into overgrown children playing Upstairs, Downstairs dress-up yet keeping them so recognizably obnoxious that we relish each miserably coy affectation...

...The mosaic quality of Rachel River is probably the result of novelist Judith Guest's stitched-together adaptation of several stories by Carol Bly...

...In terms of plot, nothing much actually happens, in the conventional sense...

...Audiences may have a bigger problem...

...I found it ironic indeed that Rachel River received a Sundance/Panavision grant, in the form of Panaflex cameras that permitted filming in difficult Minnesota temperatures of 20 below zero—ironic because Rachel River is deep freeze cinema...

...This nine-character chamber piece (scored with harmonica and cello) takes place in the slowly gentrifying London neighborhood of King's Cross, where, in one character's words, " It's amazing what you can do with a slum.' Cyril (Philip Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen) have lived together for lOyears, he supporting them as a motorbike messenger, she remaining home to tend the cacti named whimsically after British slang words for body parts...

...All of which, I suspect, bodes poorly for the subvention of American theatrical films by public television...

...Director Sandy Smolans doesn't help matters by concentrating on what seem to be the sluggish, bewildering antics of self-absorbed rustics...

...The filmmakers turn Rachel River into Dullsville...

...Their inner peace derives mainly from keeping in touch with their discontent and living quietly according to their principles...

...The point is to change it...

...Its theatrical feature wing, Film Four International, helps realize trenchant, modestly budgeted works that eschew the stagy bad habits of older British filmmakers in favor of visually arresting, live-wire treatments of contemporary class frictions, minority voices and socialism in decline...

...The kicker is that they are shooed away from the spot by a crowd of excited Japanese tourists (who aren't known for their Marxism, anyway), arriving as part of some dotty pilgrimage...

...The folks in Rachel River suffer the burdens of personal and elemental duress...

...shock comedy might be a better name for these funny yet brutal soci al commentaries of the'80s whose underclass characters cope with appalling cultural erosion...

...Both Minnesotans, Guest and Bly no doubt have a feeling for the wistful, eccentric, tradition-loving locals—mostly Scandinavian-Americans—that populate these stories...

...His sense of survival is clear-eyed, resigned yet free of undue cynicism...

...The film takes its name from a fictional town in North Minnesota, the kind of place where you can't sneeze without someone offering you a handkerchief...

...The couple next door are types who will instantly be familiar to anyone recalling Monty Python's famous "Upper Class Twit of the Year" skit...

...A young writer—a divorcee raising a family while in financial straits, who is being courted by the deputy sheriff and the village undertaker—reflects on the community's heritage in her weekly radio broadcast...

...Cyril's loud, giggly sister Val (Heather Tobias) and her husband Martin (Philip Jackson), a used car salesman, barely help out...

...Its confrontations, some of them quite noisy, contribute to the combative high-spirited mess of High Hopes...

...Goodhumored Shirley, always prepared to brew tea in an emergency, nevertheless keeps reminding him that she would like to have a child, even though they can hardly afford to provide for one...

...But Guest fails to develop the characters beyond the size of literary miniatures...

...Constructs that may offer poignant epiphanies of country life within the parameters of a short story look pale and underwritten on screen...

...An elderly Norwegian matron tends her dying husband while she recalls warmer, gayer days in both their lives...