MOVIE REVIEW : ‘SNOWMAN’: SPY FILM LEAVES VIEWERS IN COLD

When you have a subject as complex as the betrayal of one’s country, the single thing a film must make clear is why this act of treason came to be. “The Falcon and the Snowman” (selected theaters) is the true story of two young Palos Verdes buddies in the early ‘70s who capriciously fell into the business of selling U.S. spy satellite codes to the Soviets.

By the time their jaw-dropping story is over, you may feel you have traveled every inch of their journey with them, a downward spiral all the way. What you still may not understand is what really made Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) do what they did, or, more importantly, what made director John Schlesinger feel their story was worth telling.

It’s made not so much as a cautionary tale (although the ending should be deterrent enough for anyone) but as a “watch these unlovable jokers get away with this . . . and this . . . and even this.” You feel the film makers’ equal disdain for almost everyone in their story: for Daulton--as he preferred to be called--braggart and drug dealer; for his oblivious, ineffectual parents, mother (Priscilla Pointer) selling pricey real estate and father (Richard Dysart) a blustery cipher, and for Boyce’s ex-FBI-agent father (Pat Hingle), his fluttery mother (Joyce Van Patten) and their brood of nine kids, “the perfect family.”

With the exception of Lori Singer in an undefined role as Boyce’s innocent sweetheart, that leaves only Boyce, the “idealist,” to root for, which puts the film into deep trouble.

Robert Lindsey’s meticulously detailed book, on which the film is based, suggests two influences that might have begun Boyce’s disenchantment with the comfortable conservative life of his parents. One, in 1967, was with a charismatic young falconer/drug dealer with hair to his waist who had come from and cast off the same background as Boyce’s. He encouraged the younger boy’s passion for raising and training falcons, and when he incinerated himself clumsily with burning hashish oil, Boyce mourned his loss. The second influence was a young surfer/patriot who volunteered for the Marines only to lose a leg in Vietnam.

Steven Zaillian’s script has a version of the latter character, who, carrying his stash through Mexican customs in his artificial leg, acts as a cynical comment: His loss allows him to be an even more successful druggie than Daulton.

Daulton is a stone loser from the first second we see him--with no hint of a reason why. But in the state he’s in constantly, you wonder that any self-respecting Palos Verdes security patrol would let him through the door of his own house.

Nothing really lays the groundwork for the kind of deep disaffection that must have gripped Boyce when, after dropping out of the seminary, he got a job at a huge aerospace and defense plant, TRW (called in the film RTX), in its code room.

This super-secret “Black Vault” had only two other employees (Dorian Harewood, Mady Kaplan) and was run on the general plan of Club Med underground, where the shredding machine mixed a passable margarita and dope plants replaced the poinsettia as the Christmas flower. Gradually Boyce realized, via a missent telex, that the CIA was the power behind the downfall of a liberal Australian prime minister unfriendly to American bases in his country, that “RTX’s” spy satellites were monitoring friendly as well as unfriendly nations and that, as a whole, his country was not what he had believed it to be.

And so his next step, with his wacko childhood friend, was to blunt American imperialism by letting the Soviets buy our secret ciphers. True it may all be, but Daulton (played with mounting paranoia by Penn) is such an improbable space cadet that you can’t imagine the Mexico City-based Soviet officials, where he went to peddle this information, taking him seriously for one second, no matter what bait he held.

As the boys get in deeper and deeper, the film moves unsmoothly and unhelpfully--most of the time it’s an act of will just to figure out where we are, in Mexico, by the beach at Venice or somewhere in between. With an odd hair style that makes him look as though a huge black bird had died on his forehead, and his whiny, drug-induced bravado, Daulton is created as the butt of everybody’s joke, so much so that when he gets into terrible trouble with the Mexican authorities, his credit with the audience is long gone. It’s no fun to watch anyone manhandled, but between dangerous Mexican police and this poor little creep, there’s no one on the screen to give a rat’s whisker about.

Most impenetrable is Schlesinger’s viewpoint: Since he skewers the boys, their parents, the employees at the plant as well as its security system with equal vigor, it’s hard to tell what we are meant to draw from this sour and scary morality play. What makes this all the more strange is that it was Schlesinger, in his hourlong BBC film “An Englishman Abroad,” who created a rich and understandable portrait of disaffection in his story of the British spy Guy Burgess.

‘THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN’

An Orion Pictures Corp. release. A Gabriel Katzka, Hemdale presentation. Executive producer John Daly. Producers Katzka, John Schlesinger. Director Schlesinger. Screenplay Steven Zaillian based on the book by Robert Lindsey. Camera Allen Daviau. Co-producer Edward Teets. Editor Richard Marden. Costumes Albert Wolsky. Production design James D. Bissell. Original music Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays. Associate producer Michael Childers. With Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, Lori Singer, Pat Hingle, Joyce Van Patten, Richard Dysart, Priscilla Pointer, Chris Makepeace, Dorian Harewood, Mady Kaplan, Macon McCalman, David Suchet, Boris Leskin.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian)