‘ELENI’: WRITER’S TRIBUTE TO HIS MOTHER : MOVIE REVIEW : GAGE’S ‘ELENI’ A MEMORIAL TO HIS MOTHER

Eleni, as her son remembers her, was a very eagle of a Greek mother, flying in the face of those threatening her brood, ultimately even giving her life for those children. “Eleni,” (citywide) the film of those memories, soars less well, weighted down as it is by the garlands of rhetoric fashioned for it by screenwriter Steve Tesich, and by Peter Yates’ overblown direction. Yet her story is such that at times the film has the power to move us, virtually in spite of itself.

Nicholas Gage turned his mother’s life into a detailed memoir bearing her name. A man good--and careful--with words, he is an immigrant who grew up to be a journalist and eventually a respected investigative reporter for the New York Times.

Gage had arrived in America in 1948, when he was 9, after Communist guerillas, battling the monarchists, took over Lia, his tiny, craggy village in Northwestern Greece. Each family’s daughter over age 15 was conscripted for the rebel army and, when food ran low, the rest of the children were to be sent to the “people’s democracies” of Albania and Czechoslovakia.

At this point Eleni managed to smuggle her son and her three daughters out of Lia in the hopes that they might rejoin their father, already a citizen in America. For their act of “treason” Eleni and four other villagers whose families had also escaped were tortured into confessions and then shot.

Gage, with investigative skill and an underlying deep passion, turned his mother’s story and that of her village into a thick, complex book, part social history, part detailed explanation of the political turmoil that led to the Greek civil war. The narrative had a detective story hook: Gage’s sworn intention to return to Greece, to find and kill the man who had ordered his mother’s execution 30 years earlier. And so we had the fascination of following a “civilized” man, committed to a ritualistic and alien act of murder.

Admittedly, this is a fiendishly difficult story to make a movie of--you must keep two narratives, 30 years apart, sustained throughout. Tesich’s method, unfortunately, solves none of the inherent problems, and may make them worse. As a writer, Gage is dry; it is one of the strengths of his book. Tesich, on the other hand, is moist and preachy, (consider “Four Friends” or “American Flyers”). With the exception of his early “Breaking Away,” which held it in check somewhat, sentimentality has virtually become Tesich’s trademark. For his part, director Yates seems to have decided that murderous intent makes one surly and unpleasant.

So, in Greece, warring factions flail at one another with sneering oratory. And in America, the adult Gage (John Malkovich) is frankly derisive when his wife objects, sensibly enough, to his leaving her and his son to go on his obsessive quest. He simply goes, taking the job as the Times’ bureau chief in Athens, where he is a still bigger sorehead to his associates. (His duties seemingly leave him unlimited free time to search for the assassin.)

Malkovich’s performance has problems other than sourness of personality. He’s detached, remote, inaudible most of the time; the damnedest choice for a bulldog-like investigative journalist. It’s impossible to fathom why he took this tack, but such matters are usually laid at the door of the director, in which case Yates has a lot to answer for.

With Malkovich astonishingly uncharismatic as her son, Kate Nelligan’s Eleni is quite the opposite. She’s a Greek goddess who stands out in any crowd, not a village woman who had never slept on anything but the floor until her husband came back from America and insisted on a brass bed.

Her dialogue does nothing to make her human: It makes her a noble figurehead called “Mother.” She must constantly go on to her children about the great joys of motherhood, although from what these kids have seen, motherhood has meant the joys of maiming one’s child (to keep her out of the guerrilla army) and the joys of imprisonment with the likelihood of death. It’s enough to keep one’s offspring single and celibate forever.

Nelligan is best at her very last scenes, when she’s allowed to look ravaged and slightly more real. It’s here that Eleni gains equal footing with the grieving, black-dressed mothers of the world today and, along with her melodramatic but actual last words, “My children!,” these may be the images that last longest in the memory and soften some complaints.

Meanwhile, back in the present, as Gage tracks down his quarry at last, Tesich sabotages the scene with sentimentality one more time. You will have to read the book to find out the real motivation for Gage’s actions. They had nothing to do with the appearance of a child just the age of Gage’s son (and just the age of the young Nicholas when he was parted from his mother).

Most notable of the supporting cast are Oliver Cotton, who plays the villainous Katis ringingly (particularly at the end), and Linda Hunt, as a Lia villager who is a defiant voice of reason, although I regret to say the voice is Back Bay.

(It’s also worth mentioning that although the actual child maiming and the torture sequences are not fully completed on screen, their horrifying impact makes the film’s PG rating seem lightheaded. PG-13 would be far more realistic.)

‘ELENI’ A Warner Bros. release of a CBS Productions presentation of a Vanoff/Pick/Gage production. Producers Nick Vanoff, Mark Pick, Nicholas Gage. Director Peter Yates. Screenplay Steve Tesich from the book “Eleni” by Gage. Camera Billy Williams. Production design Roy Walker. Costumes Tom Rand. Editor Ray Lovejoy. Music Bruce Smeaton. Associate producer Nigel Wooll. Art director Steve Spence. Sound Ivan Sharrock. With Kate Nelligan, John Malkovich, Linda Hunt, Oliver Cotton, Ronald Pickup, Dimitra Arliss.

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested)