The William Kennedy novel plays better on screen than any reader could have expected, though not all of it plays all that well. Those intermittent communions with the spirit world that do so much to force the reader's half-closed eyelids to flutter to full alert (Did I just read what I thought I read?) are impossibly hoked up here by the Marley's Ghost apparitions, accompanied by organ music, of men in white suits, with floured faces. And the protagonist's addresses to them ("Why did you kill me?" one of them has bluntly put to him), audible to all within earshot, and thus causing a lot of heads to swivel on a public bus, come across as standard movie terminology for garden-variety lunacy. The filmmakers -- Kennedy himself, who wrote the script, and the Brazilian director Hector Babenco -- didn't dare dress up the most significant dead person, a thirteen-day-old infant, in an all-white, bunny-eared, cotton-tailed sleeper, and thank heaven for small mercies. But they did dare convene an all-singing, all-candle-holding dead-man's chorus near the end. Further, the flashbacks employing a young actor who looks nothing like the older Jack Nicholson are a typically feeble and unacceptable cinematic solution to dealing with a plot in which so much of the action necessarily takes place a long time past. That there are fewer flashbacks on screen than on the page falls again into the category of small mercies. As a result of such mercies, the material, earthly, and earthy elements of the story now far outbalance the spiritual and supernatural; and the sustaining strength of the movie is in its convincing re-creation of the here and now -- or rather the there and then -- of Albany, N.Y., in 1938, and the daily life of its indigents. Quietly well acted by Nicholson, Tom Waits, Carroll Baker, and others, and showily well acted by Meryl Streep. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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