MOVIE REVIEW : Little Tramp in a Tougher World

The emergence of original, outstanding directing talent is always exciting. It’s a hint that film may get a transfusion of lifeblood richer than the anemic reconstituted stuff trickling in from Movie of the Week directors or sleek MTV stylists.

Authentic talents make their mark from the first: Spike Lee was someone to watch after “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” as is Terence Davies after “Distant Voices, Still Lives.” Jim Sheridan, of “My Left Foot,” is clearly a writer-director of intelligence and bracing unsentimentality and Jane Campion--whose stunner, “Sweetie,” will be here before long--has a pure, distinctive vision.

And now, with the magical “Sidewalk Stories” (opening Friday at the AMC Century 14), we can add Charles Lane, who has had the audacity to make a black-and-white silent movie and make it, in the face of today’s shamelessly callous values, with a brimming heart and an activist’s outraged passion.

Lane, the film’s producer, writer, director, co-editor and central figure, plays a character Chaplin would recognize. Called only the Artist, he’s a bashful, ingenious Greenwich Village street portraitist, scuffling to get by in the breath-defining New York winter.

The physically small Lane is part of a collection of street performers--tap-dancers, jugglers, three-card monte dealers--who seem to dwarf him, particularly his bullying rival (Tom Hoover) who might have migrated in from a basketball team. In true silent-movie fashion, the Artist isn’t above a bit of sly retaliation, taking a blowtorch to his competitor’s sketchpad.

But in the way Hoover towers over Lane, the city looms over them all, bleak, frightening and bitingly cold. That is the demarcation between “Sidewalk Stories,” which cares intensely about its street people and their homeless neighbors, and Chaplin, who used little tramps and hobos as stylized, sentimental figures. There is no shortage of emotion here or sentiment either, but it’s built on harsher bedrock.

Unexpectedly, the unfettered Lane finds himself in charge of an adorable 2-year-old (Nicole Alysia), wrested out of the care of both parents. He puts her up at his digs, the last remains of a demolished building that he has jerry-rigged to have lights, although it’s without heat or a mattress. Lane’s character isn’t supposed to be able to resist the big-eyed, pony-tailed Alysia; it would be surprising if anyone could .

As he searches for the toddler’s mother, Lane re-meets a warm, magically unattached baby-store owner (Sandye Wilson), whom, in a delicately charged scene, he has once sketched. She is also astonishingly compassionate for a New Yorker; watching him shoplift clothes for his little charge, she pretends not to see.

Lane is a master at fending for himself, but like someone seeing the city from wheelchair height for the first time, he suddenly begins to see his surroundings from a 2-year-old’s precarious point of view. Pushing a stroller, he can no longer dart across red lights. Picking a bathroom door in a restaurant becomes a dicey choice. Just how fierce can he get with sandbox bullies--and their mink-coated mothers?

Lane relies entirely on mime and Marc Marder’s buoyant, brilliantly scored music to carry his story points--he even scorns intertitles. Marder is a wonderful choice: He has themes here as memorable as some that Chaplin did for his “Limelight” score. And Bill Dill, the cinematographer, creates equal atmosphere and presence with his rich black-and-white camera work.

However, not all of his cast have Lane’s delicate control of silent storytelling; the picture occasionally wobbles when its mimes are less expert or when the plot gets a little too far-fetched, as in its taxi-kidnap incident.

About its equally unlikely love story you may feel more tender, since Wilson is so glowingly readable and real. Nice to think that this cross-class attraction would hold, even when experience suggests otherwise. Lane even creates a dream love scene that might have popped out of “She’s Gotta Have It,” one that Chaplin’s buttoned-up Tramp would never have allowed himself. (It’s Lane’s moment of quick nudity that gives the film its unfortunate R-rating.)

Wilson is pushed to shelter these two when Lane comes back to find his makeshift flat bulldozed and everything inside ruined. Now he doesn’t even have the luxury of a stroller, and the reality of life with a child during the harsh winter is awful. They try missions, but those fill up on the worst nights. Lane’s stated intention--that no one look at the homeless in quite the same way after his film--may be realized more acutely after this gentle fable than after more hard-edged portraits, simply because his characters are so tenderly drawn and his touch is, for the most part, so tactful and restrained.

All the more reason to feel that Lane has underestimated his power in his film’s very last scenes, when he shifts techniques abruptly and allows his homeless to speak. It’s clearly a mistake that comes from the heart and from inexperience, but he should have trusted the enormous bond he had created with us and kept his final eloquent plea within his own stylistic constraints.

It’s a mistake, not a disaster. “Sidewalk Stories” is a bold and utterly enchanting creation, and its appearance is a signal to watch the multifaceted Lane closely. Whatever happens next cannot be commonplace.