MOVIE REVIEW : FREEDOM MAKES WAVES IN ‘TURTLE DIARY’

Special and beautiful, “Turtle Diary” (Goldwyn Pavilion) may sound like a film about clenched Britishers, so rigidly polite they’re barely functional, but it’s not. Instead, it’s funny, quite lyrical and utterly unexpected, a meditation on the varieties of personal freedom, with surprises as brisk as smelling salts.

A few may already know its source, Russell Hoban’s memorable novel, distinctive enough to have the London Times place him “among the greatest, timeless novelists.” Although no film can (or should) contain the book’s linguistic and ruminative peregrinations, Harold Pinter has done the adaptation fearlessly and well, and director John Irvin (“Champions,” “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”) has provided the maximum illumination with the minimum of fuss.

Naera (Glenda Jackson), a successful children’s book author and illustrator who fears she’s run out of invention, and William (Ben Kingsley), a Bloomsbury bookshop assistant, meet while watching three great sea turtles swimming their futile, endless laps around the cramped tanks at the London Aquarium.

These ancient turtles, on display now for 30 years, have a humane keeper (Michael Fairbairn), bulky and mustachioed. His answer to the question of whether they’re happy is succinct: “Shouldn’t think so. They’re born for the ocean, you see.”

It’s the grain of sand dropped into two thoughtful oysters. Very slowly, almost to their own horror, Jackson and Kingsley, two distinctly separate people, begin “thinking turtle thoughts,” concocting a scheme to crate up these behemoths and drive them 250 miles to the Cornish coast to set them free (shades of Dr. Dolittle and the seal).

Their act has magnificently unpredictable results. Understandably, Jackson and Kingsley are changed by it, but in unexpected ways. No filmic cliches, no swelling musical score; these are no “littul peeple” who melt into each other’s arms, but blessedly real people, who get exhausted and don’t talk all the time.

There are far-reaching effects, however and they are felt at Kingsley’s boarding house, by Rosemary Leach as his very special landlady; Eleanor Bron as the horrifyingly refined and solitary Miss Neap, and by Kingsley’s nemesis, Sandor, a hulking, piggish slob (Jeroen Krabbe, the memorable “Fourth Man”).

The joy of the film is its subtlety, the pointillistic effect of its portraits and the mordant intelligence of both actors. Author Hoban set the ironic, quietly self-deprecating tone (the turtles swim, for example, in “a little bedsitter of ocean”); Pinter echoes it deftly.

In Jackson’s case, her sea change is small, but it has a bracing wallop. Characters that we’d never quite looked at closely are brought into focus in her life. In the case of Kingsley, we watch a man become more sure of himself and more attractive before our eyes--and not only ours. (A quietly erotic stillness has always been one of this actor’s gifts, and director Irvin uses that quality to its fullest.)

If “Turtle Diary” is a film of reflection, it’s also one of reflections. Peter Hannan’s camera gives a hypnotic quality to the mysterious depths of the aquarium, the windows of a speeding night train, lovers’ faces as they watch the strong, slow-moving turtles. His photography is helped enormously by Peter Tanner’s editing and Geoffrey Burgon’s splendid musical score. And Leo Austin’s production design re-creates, in many places, the novel’s haunting descriptions, even the recurring sea blue that turns up on Kingsley’s astonishing walls.

The last value of “Turtle Diary” is that it may create a new generation of readers for Hoban’s exceptional book. (Or there could be a double reward: Perhaps the unrecalled friend to whom I lent my copy all those years ago will be reminded gently into giving it back.) ‘TURTLE DIARY’

A CBS Theatrical Films presentation of a United British Artists/Britannic production. Released by Samuel Goldwyn Co. Producer Richard Johnson. Executive producer Peter Snell. Director John Irvin. Screenplay Harold Pinter, based on the novel “Turtle Diary” by Russell Hoban. Camera Peter Hannan. Editor Peter Tanner. Music Geoffrey Burgon. Production design Leo Austin. With Glenda Jackson, Ben Kingsley, Richard Johnson, Michael Gambon, Jeroen Krabbe, Rosemary Leach, Eleanor Bron, Harriet Walter, Pauline Letts, Harold Pinter.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).