‘THERAPY’ RUNS WILD WITH A CAST OF CRAZIES

Once in a while, a movie sneaks in under your guard, tickling you unawares and there is nothing to do but give in to it. Christopher Durang’s 1981 play, “Beyond Therapy,” which hinges on a bisexual triangle, may not at all play for the AIDS ‘80s. (It opens today at selected theaters.)

Yet in adapting this psycho-sexual farce for the screen, director and co-writer Robert Altman has stocked it with the juiciest cast imaginable: Jeff Goldblum to play the moist-eyed, impulsively straying lover; Julie Hagerty, of the flowing hair and demitasse-size voice as his prospective amour and the infinitely hilarious Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel of “This Is Spinal Tap”) as the third side of the triangle of neurotic New Yorkers.

And there is even better to come: Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson as a pair of psychiatrists with adjoining offices and matching libidos. Conti plays Hagerty’s Italian-accented therapist, and Jackson plays Goldblum’s, a woman of monumental prejudices. Genevieve Page peers in at the mad proceedings as Guest’s chic and hysterical French mama, and among the revolving-door lovers from the French bistro where part of the action takes place, Cris Campion (“Pirates”) stands out as a sexually troubled young waiter.

It is a raffish and assured cast, moved at a dizzying clip, and again Altman has cinematographer Pierre Mignot and the production designs of Stephen Altman for the picture’s impeccable look. I realize that its broadside against psychiatry--or psychobabble, to be more precise--was probably more current in its original time than now.

But it’s too late for me. All Jackson has to do, in that office decorated with children’s crayon drawings, is to begin to free-associate to try to draw a bead on the word she wants ( patient , to be exact), muttering through paparazzi to polyester, and I am hers.

She is, as suggested, wildly neurotic. Just the thought of the Venus De Milo without, ughhh, arms is enough to start her head wagging like one of those hula dolls in the back window of the car in front of you. Do not even bring up the subject of homosexuality with her. (The film is rated R for language and sexual situations.)

And then there is Conti, who has broken almost every doctor-patient relationship possible. Next to Roberto Benigni (“Down by Law”), who really is Italian, Conti has managed one of the most sublimely comic combinations of accent and gesture in memory. (So good that the resolution in the final scene seems as unfair to the actor as the out-of-character unmasking of Peter Sellers in the final credits of “Being There.”)

Finally, there’s Christopher Guest, who has great good reason to be intensely jealous. Guest’s characterization is perfect as it was in “Spinal Tap”: heel-and-toeing at the head of his therapy group as they jog through Central Park, sucking his thumb on Jackson’s couch, peering balefully at interloper Hagerty.

And these days, three great comic performances--in addition to Goldblum’s and Hagerty’s linchpin ones--are a lot to be thankful for.