MOVIE REVIEWS : FROM NEW ORLEANS TO THE COAST OF MAINE : ‘CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD’

For why is all around us here

As if some lesser god had made the world,

But had not force to shape it as he would?

--”Idylls of the King,”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Children of a Lesser God” (citywide), which had its stage premiere at the Mark Taper in 1979, is an exceptionally adroit adaptation of a play to the screen. As a film, it flows beautifully under Randa Haines’ direction and has considerable humor as well as dramatic intensity. It is a classic love story--romantic, passionate, involving vibrant characters.

What makes it different is that the woman has been deaf her entire life. This means that in this couple’s struggle to communicate we see magnified the challenges that face any two people attempting to make a life together in today’s world.

James (William Hurt) is a teacher of speech to the hard of hearing who’s drifted from one school to the next until he has landed on a quaint Victorian campus on the coast of Maine, a setting right out of Currier and Ives. At the outset, the decent but conservative head of the school (Philip Bosco) tells this clearly restless man not to make waves.

James soon has his 11th graders dancing and singing to rock music, as they happily respond to the vibrations. He has also noticed a beautiful young woman named Sarah (Marlee Matlin, who actually is hard of hearing), once a pupil but now a custodian. He quickly realizes that she’s as bright as her temperament is fiery.

But why should she spend her life doing janitorial work? What traumatized her so that she adamantly refuses to try to learn how to speak, preferring only to sign? (Ironically, while in time we learn all about Sarah, we never know as much about James as we’d like to.)

What makes “Children of a Lesser God” come so poignantly alive is its understanding of the psychology of close relationships between the hard of hearing and “normal” people. Anyone who grew up with a parent or relative who was hard of hearing will recognize the frustration and the rage that so frequently sweep over Sarah, making life difficult and exhausting for James as well as for herself.

Sarah has turned signing into a kind of swift, eloquent form of expression, but for James, signing sometimes becomes tiring. He longs to listen to his beloved Bach but how can he now enjoy such music when his lover can’t?

At the same time we come to appreciate Sarah’s need to draw reinforcement, inspiration and relaxation from being with others who are hearing-impaired--and that this need applies to members of any minority.

Hurt and Matlin’s finely drawn portrayals emerge from this painfully accurate delineation of tensions underlying the relationship. James is so deeply in love and so deeply challenged by the enigma that is Sarah that he’s in danger of becoming more of an overbearing invader than a lover. Sarah, in turn, is so fiercely proud and independent and self-enclosed that she poses an equal threat to their relationship.

Hurt and Matlin make James and Sarah’s passion for each other a tangible experience; the question is whether they’ll stop struggling to bring each into the other’s world long enough to discover how to create a world of their own. Crucial to their fate is Sarah’s mother, beautifully underplayed by Piper Laurie, as a woman whose bitter indifference to her daughter proves deceptive.

Playwright Mark Medoff and his co-adapter Hesper Anderson have carefully rethought his stage piece as a movie. The result is a handsome film (rated R for blunt language, signed and spoken, and some nudity) to which cinematographer John Seale gives a mellow, burnished glow, complementing production designer Gene Callahan’s warm, traditional settings.

Medoff hasn’t the answer to Tennyson’s question anymore than anyone else has, but he does have a notion of what it takes to handle whatever fate has dealt us.

‘CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD’

A Paramount presentation. Producers Burt Sugarman, Patrick Palmer. Director Randa Haines. Screenplay Hesper Anderson, Mark Medoff; based on Medoff’s play. Camera John Seale. Music Michael Convertino. Production designer Gene Callahan. Costumes Renee April. Associate producer Candace Koethe. Choreographer Dan Siretta. Second-unit camera Fred Guthe. Film editor Lisa Fruchtman. With William Hurt, Marlee Matlin, Piper Laurie, Philip Bosco, Allison Gompf, John F. Cleary, Philip Holmes.

Running time: 1 hours, 59 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).