‘GRACE AND CHUCK’: AN AMAZING STORY

The question before the movie house is whether there is room on the screen for a contemporary fable, a tale of innocence with something on its mind.

The immediate difficulty with using words like innocence and fable is that they suggest a story with the consistency of custard or warm Jell-O. But the idealistic and oddly appealing venture called “Amazing Grace and Chuck” is rife with dramatic conflict and has a most palpable villain--a suave high-level maneuver in a stretch limo who stands for all the munitions moguls with a vested interest in keeping the world in an arms race toward Armageddon.

What the film has on its mind is the nuclear nightmare, and most especially the specter of nuclear war as it has infiltrated the consciousness and the fears of children, whether or not they admit it to their parents, their teachers or even their closest friends.

(One of the local anti-nuclear organizations, the Thursday Night Group, aims specifically at combating children’s fears and their feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness.)

Getting “Amazing Grace and Chuck” made has been a frustrating four-year struggle for David Field, who wrote and produced it. Eventually, through Howard Koch Jr., then the head of production for Rastar, it was financed by Turnstar, a Ray Stark-Ted Turner joint venture. Tri-Star is releasing the film.

Field was last in the news as half of the luckless team (with Steven Bach) that ran production at United Artists during the hellish season of “Heaven’s Gate.” By an irony that did not escape him, “Amazing Grace and Chuck” was shot largely in Montana, where Michael Cimino did his film and where so much of UA’s money bit the dust.

“Amazing Grace and Chuck” was made for what is a pittance by present standards, just over $5 million, although the film includes important performances by Gregory Peck, Jamie Lee Curtis and William L. Petersen, from William Friedkin’s “To Live and Die in L.A.”

The Chuck of the title is a schoolboy who gets to tour a Minuteman 3 silo near his hometown. He is horrified, not thrilled or comforted, and he decides to give up Little League (he’s an unbeatable pitcher) until there are no more nukes.

The Amazing Grace of the title is a Boston Celtics star (played by Denver Nuggets star Alex English) who thinks Chuck is on the right track, philosophically. Amazingly, he gives up his $1-million-a-year basketball career to live in a converted barn near Chuck’s town. Pretty soon everybody’s opting out of sports.

In Phase II, all the world’s children stop speaking (which makes this a miracle play). Their silence forces President Peck and the Soviet premier to the table, and the world, it begins to seem, may yet live ever after.

As Michael Wilmington pointed out in his regretful review last week, the medium is not always up to the message. (The title, while distinctive and memorable, gave me problems by seeming to suggest some other kind of film entirely.) Chuck (Joshua Zuehlke) is solemn and endearing but even in his talkative scenes he could have used some more dialogue to round out his precocious character.

The pace occasionally falters and the film, directed by Mike Newell, who also made so wildly different a venture as “Dance With a Stranger,” does not always get around the problem of having to suggest massive, worldwide action on a minimal budget.

But the best of “Amazing Grace and Chuck” is first-rate, and this includes a very strong and characterful portrait of a good, gentle, tough-minded President by Peck, an easy and ingratiating performance by Alex English, strong and emotional moments by Curtis as the athlete’s agent, and some quietly intense work by Petersen as Chuck’s confused father.

Yet, as sometimes happens, “Amazing Grace and Chuck” can be judged, has to be judged, not so much on its aesthetics as on its aura of dedication and innocence and the earnestness and importance of its intentions. Critics have had mixed feelings, but the film has proved to have a strong appeal to family audiences and especially to children, because it obviously addresses the feelings of helplessness that have been reported by teachers and counselors.

It is indeed a fable, as “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a fable. And like much of Capra’s work, it uses What if as a device for making a look at What is a little easier to take.

Here and abroad there is a large body of anti-nuclear activists, by no means all or even principally unilateral disarmers. “Amazing Grace and Chuck” is obviously intended to reach beyond the already concerned and committed and to touch those of any age who have felt the fears and the powerlessness.

The fable is not a solution; the next NBA season is not in jeopardy and children will not stop talking. But the film, whose innocent optimism seems daring if not foolhardy in the present climate of movies, generates hope by resorting to an old truth: It’s better to light one candle than curse the gathering darkness.