An exhibit of the virtues of moderation. No melodramatic extremes; no emotional peaks or psychological valleys; no back-bending pressures; no ticking-clock deadlines; no convulsive climaxes. If someone hits the lottery, it will be for a few thousand, not a few million. If someone pivotal suffers a stroke, it will be only the very mildest. If someone has to die, it will be no one pivotal. The payoff of this cautious middle course is a convincing sense of the lived life in the small town of North Bath, N.Y. ("Home" -- proclaims a premature billboard -- "of The Ultimate Escape theme park. Opening 1995!") You get to know your way round the place, under a plush carpet of snow from late autumn onward. You get to know a number of the locals, quite a large and varied circle of them. You tune your ear to the slippery-smooth and glintingly polished dialogue. You settle in. And if the movie doesn't stay with you for long afterwards, you, at any rate, stay with it for the duration. At the center of it is a marginal figure named Donald Sullivan, a free-lance handyman with a bum knee from a fall off a scaffold six months past. Paul Newman is well at ease in the role, and of course the movie could never have got off the ground without him, or someone of equivalent stature. Still, he automatically and unpreventably moves the man in from the margin, where he properly belongs, to the center of the universe: cynosure of all eyes, measure of all things. It isn't Newman's fault he's so big a star, and it isn't his fault the system demands one, but the movie suffers for it nonetheless. And maybe after all it's partly his fault that the character is so soft through and through (from puddly heart to padded, rounded edges), whether that's the way he chose to play it or the way he was induced to sign on for it. With Dylan Walsh, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy; written and directed by Robert Benton. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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