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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 09/12/1996, B: garets mother; directed by Mort Ransen. , A: garets mother; directed by Mort Ransen. ,

Mother Night

One of the major adolescent influences on many men of a certain age is the 1960s work of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. After seeing an adaptation of Keith (Midnight Clear) Gordon's Mother Night, I'm wondering whether Vonnegut's novels weren't, well, adolescent.

Nick Nolte is awkwardly cast as Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American who, at the beginning of the film, is being held for trial as a war criminal in an Israeli prison camp. He's given a typewriter to compile his memoirs, and the film switches from dusty black and white to ominous technicolor while Campbell explains how as a successful expatriate playwright in pre-war Nazi Germany he accepted the challenge to act as an Allied spy under the guise of a Tokyo Rose-style radio propagandist. As with the team in Mission Impossible, all knowledge of him and his assignment are denied at war's end.

Vonnegut's sensibility ranges bumpily from black cynicism to its alter ego, ardent sentimentality, and from absurdist farce to the most shameless melodrama. Perhaps it's the voice that makes this work in the novel; the overtness of cinema just renders the gaps painfully plain. And though Gordon exhibits some ingenuity in details, tone, and juxtapositions, in the end this Night offers neither darkness nor light. Screens Sunday at the Copley Place at 5, 7:30, and 10 p.m., and on Monday at 10:50 a.m. and 1:20 and 3:50 p.m. Director Keith Gordon will appear at tonight's 7:30 p.m. showing.

-- Peter Keough