A Craving for Summer’s Solid Film Fare

The struggles of children to come to terms with the legacies left by their parents form the backbone of a pair of sterling films which have just arrived this week. Just in time, too, before this becomes a loony, goofy, laugh-riot summer at the movies.

I’m not putting down fun. You can have a simply marvelous time at “Big,” and find yourself touched by it as well; the teams of Midler and Tomlin and Tomlin and Midler as well as Hoskins and Rabbit are just about unbeatable, as are the participants in all the sports of “Bull Durham,” but they’re like a feast of desserts--sooner or later you crave more solid fare before your teeth rot. (There’s also the team of Schwarzenegger and Belushi to be reckoned with, at least if you follow box-office stats. However, these two are mired in a work not worthy of either one of their talents, and a serious disappointment if you’re a fan of early, classic Walter Hill.)

The heavy-hitter movies this summer are the enthralling, “A World Apart,” a daughter’s view of her journalist-mother, an anti-apartheid activist and the first white woman to be jailed under the infamous 90-day detention act, and “da,” a glowing translation of Hugh Leonard’s play in which present and memory talk back to one another in tart and tender Irish cadances.

“A World Apart” comes sanctified by Cannes, where it won the Special Grand Prize of the Jury, not given routinely and considered unofficially to be a tie for first prize. It also divided the best actress honors three ways, among Barbara Hershey, young Jodhi May and Linda Mvusi. It is the first feature direction of the noted cinematographer Chris Menges, as well as the autobiographical first screenplay of Shawn Slovo whose mother, Ruth First, is the basis for Hershey’s Diana Roth. Slovo herself is called Molly Roth, and as played by the phenomenal May, she is a 12-year-old who is all elbows, huge eyes and yearning for the only thing her mother can’t give: Time and explanations about her work.

The accent-perfect May is not even South African; discussing her casting in Cannes, Menges credited the Anna Scher Theater School in London, a seemingly exceptional haven for young actors where May trained and from which she seems to have emerged with a rare intensity and naturalness. You would have to go back to the Patty Duke of “The Miracle Worker,” or to Peggy Ann Garner from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” for a performance by an adolescent that was so fresh, so true and so moving.

Slovo’s mother was assassinated by a parcel bomb at her university offices late in 1982, nearly 20 years after the action of “A World Apart,” and she has described the first draft she wrote just after the tragedy as “messy and self-pitying.” Revisions have certainly fine-tuned it: Slovo has taken the broad subject of opposition to apartheid and shown it as it works out in the daily lives of blacks and privileged whites. She has dealt in specifics and in what she knew most intimately, the need of a daughter for more than a harassed, loving mother can give. Like most good art, these details are the stuff that makes the difference. “A World Apart” becomes real to us through the mother-daughter dilemma which Slovo sets down with such pain and such clarity, as well as through its larger, crueler political issue.

Always, with the acting of young people, you wonder about the director’s wiles. Menges, I’ve heard, has a passel of children himself; he certainly must have paid attention to them. There are details here that no one unfamiliar with the day-to-day interaction within families could toss off as Menges has done, with just the proper blend of authority, nonchalance and tenderness.

He has also been one of a tight group of cinematographers who take pains not to call attention to themselves; a journalist-cinematographer when the occasion demanded it (the invasion sequence of “The Killing Fields,” or the whole of “Fatherland”), a lush visual stylist when that was required, (“The Mission” or those vast pinky twilights of “Local Hero.”). Here, he directs with the journalist’s hand uppermost, even in potentially ultra-dramatic moments, such as actress Mvusi’s reaction to news of her arrested brother--one of the film’s most outward expressions of pain. Tautness, lack of heroics and a sense that we know and care for real, ordinary-scale people are what give “A World Apart” the immediacy that “Cry Freedom” tried for so valiantly but never achieved.

Over at “da,” (originally spelled with an uppercase “D” for the Broadway production, but now lowercase for no discernible reason) miracles have been achieved in bringing a play to fullness on the screen. There are wonders in the performance end, absolutely, from Barnard Hughes (Da incarnate since the play’s inception 10 years ago) and Martin Sheen, who could not be improved upon as the emigrant son-now-playwright. Wonders, too, of production design and detail, which may be a bit fussy under the credits but become restrained and rich in setting this small Dalkey house and its breathtaking surroundings in our memory.

The film is actually a set of variations on the old joke-song, “How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?” Home to Ireland for the funeral of his 80-some year old Da, Charlie (Sheen), wrestles with his emotions about an impossible father who will--literally--not leave his side, even though he’s not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

We are talking impossible here. Da is one of those Irishmen who found nothing basically offensive about Hitler in the early ‘40s, since he would seemingly be giving the English what-for shortly. A man with a stock phrase for every occasion at the tip of his tongue, a blatherer, a forelock-tugging cringing employee and a moral coward. And . . . Charlie’s father. (whether adoptive or actual is a minor point.)

The sheer richness of the language in “da” is irresistible, and in the set-tos between Sheen and Hughes, the back-and-forth caresses of the Irish tongue give the encounters the sting of a great tennis match. But playwright Leonard, who a year after the opening of his play, also set down Da in his novel “Home Before Night,” has been able to create in the round incidents which the play could only sketch, such as the putting-down of the “anti-clerical” family dog, or a tour of the home of the Protestant gentry for whom Da has gardened for more than 50 years. (Expand, contract, expand, in relation to “da,” Leonard must feel like an accordion player.)

In their quite different ways, “Betrayal” and “Stevie” have always seemed high-water marks in the lyrical transition of stage to screen. Now they are joined by “da,” which was produced by Julie Corman and directed by actor Matt Clark, in his film directing debut. The visual enrichments of “da” are not simply filigree: We see more than any words could tell, another generation of hypenate-Americans taking on the heritage of their homeland. It’s this continuum that adds another layer to the deep satisfaction which “da” provides.