MOVIE REVIEWS : MAKING THE MOST OF INFLUENCE : ‘Power’ Loses Its Juice Among High-Tech Visuals and Sexless Diatribe

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, why is Sidney Lumet’s “Power” (selected theaters) the sexless diatribe that it is, all high-tech visuals and no emotional grounding? Its sole juiciness comes from Gene Hackman as a raffish Southern media consultant, well-cured in bourbon and branch water. The outlandish daring of his performance is almost rave-up enough to recommend the movie. Almost.

This is the first produced screenplay by David Himmelstein, a former newspaperman with a background as a political speechwriter. According to the press notes, it was on election night, 1982, while watching a series of political TV ads strung end to end, that Himmelstein first noticed “that the candidates were virtually interchangeable and possibly a less significant part of the political process than their media consultants.”

Flushed with that discovery, he wrote what is now “Power.” The pity is that if he’d been a moviegoer, he might have made that identical discovery 10 years earlier in “The Candidate.” He might also have learned that messages travel better in the mouths of real characters who have shading, subtlety and humor, not with shadow puppets, no matter how skillfully manipulated.

Although it’s difficult to believe that any American of voting age could find Himmelstein’s conclusion startling, it’s not hard to see why Lumet, noted as a grappler with social issues (“Daniel,” “The Verdict,” “Prince of the City”), could be intrigued by his material. What’s strange is that Lumet would choose to heighten the script’s cuckoo sterility, rather than try to humanize it.

Richard Gere, mustached and dressed so as to make a GQ subscriber weep with envy, carries the brunt of the film (quite well). He plays Pete St. John, a madly sought-after media manipulator and veritible one-man band. He has one very close assistant, Kate Capshaw, made up to look almost exactly like his ex-wife, British journalist Julie Christie, the movie’s most sinned-against performer. But, make no mistake, it’s Gere and Gere alone in his private jet, speeding from client to client and from hot shot to political hot spot. And while he jets, he relaxes by drumming along, almost in time, to Gene Krupa’s killer solo in “Sing, Sing, Sing.” It may be meant to signify chutzpah, in which case it works.

Among Gere’s many clients is a guberuatorial candidate (she’s Michael Learned, but she looks like Jane Byrne), running for reelection in Seattle in the wake of a damaging divorce and remarriage, and a Latin American socialist, during whose speechifying a terrorist act occurs. Gere directs his camera crew to catch his candidate cradling a bloody victim, then whisks the candidate to safety in a private van. Gere’s stroke of genius is to order the candidate never to wash his shirt and to wear it at every future rally. You might think his orders would include taking the victim along to the hospital as a sort of goodwill gesture in the eyes of the world press, but, hey, Gere knows his business better than we do.

He learned it from Hackman, from whom he has since split; the two are friendly rivals as the picture begins. Also involved are the mysterious Billings (Denzel Washington), who hires Gere to create visibility for his client Jerome Cade (J. T. Walsh). That Gere will take the job is an example of his rotted moral fiber, since Walsh is running for the Senate seat of Gere’s closest friend, solar power advocate Sam Hastings who claims he’s seriously ill. (He’s E. G. Marshall in a Novocained performance.)

In writing his didactic melodrama of manipulation and image-making on a global scale, Himmelstein apparently felt his news--that today’s political candidates are created not only equal but interchangeable--could stand on its own, without the need to beguile us with characterization or suspense.

And in Lumet’slap there also is the matter of two perfectly appalling performances, by Beatrice Straight (who won an Academy Award under Lumet’s direction in “Network”), and, inexplicably, by Julie Christie, whose misfired and mannered delivery seems to have been put together from outtakes. If you are a Christie fan, give “Power” the widest possible berth; you will not wish to believe what you see and hear.

Most damaging of all the “Power” failures is the pure arbitrariness of the script. Although one major character changes--faintly--for the better, it certainly cannot be as a result of anything he or she learned, but rather because the writer decided it was time for repentence. In the case of “Power” itself, it’s a little late for that emotion.

‘POWER’ A Lorimar Motion Pictures presentation of a Polar Film Production, released by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. Producers Reene Schisgal, Mark Tarlov. Director Sidney Lumet. Associate producers Wolfgang Glattes, Kenneth Utt. Camera Andrzej Bartowiak. Production design Peter Larkin. Costumes Anna Hill Johnstone. Editor Andrew Mondshein. Original music Cy Coleman. Art director William Barclay, set decorator Thomas C. Tonery. Sound Maurice Schell. With Richard Gere, Julie Christie, Gene Hackman, Kate Capshaw, Denzel Washington, E. G. Marshall, Beatrice Straight, Fritz Weaver, Michael Learned, J. T. Walsh, E. Katherine Kerr, Matt Salinger.

Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

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