MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Hawks’: Frolicsome Look at Facing Mortality

There’s a surprising verbal energy in “Hawks” (AMC Century 14). Though it’s about male bonding and life-affirmation in a ward for people suffering from terminal bone-marrow disease, director Robert Ellis Miller and his actors play it mostly blithe and light.

Roy Clarke is a gifted writer (the British TV comedy “Flickers”) but his premise here is peculiar, more dreamed-up than felt-out. The movie’s central notion--facing death by going on boy’s-night-out sprees--mixes up the dolorous and the frolicsome in skittering, over-bright ways.

The main characters are a rakish British solicitor (Timothy Dalton) and an American football player (Anthony Edwards). When they meet in the ward, the solicitor’s lines have the fragrant bravura and plummy extravagance of a Shakespearean player on bank holiday.

Stocking hat jammed to his eyes, like Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Dalton’s Bancroft is a McMurphy who can’t find his Nurse Ratched--he’s made the world his Ratched instead. He’s always busting out for a jaunt to a disco or brothel. When his friend, played with nice understatement by Edwards, moons about suicide attempts, he’s ready to wheel him up to the roof and help push him off--all in fun, of course.

This dark-joke binge atmosphere carries into the film’s last act, an expedition to Amsterdam where the buddies, disguised as doctors and driving an ambulance, are joined by two plain Janes from England (Janet McTeer and Camille Coduri). And the edginess of the premise, which works well in its first scene--a spectacular suicide attempt in a rock quarry--tends to thicken up later on.

The theme is the reverse of Kurosawa’s great “Ikiru,” where Takashi Shimura’s Watanabe faced his mortality with self-sacrifice and good works. In this movie’s world, Shimura instead would have taken Toshiro Mifune on long toots through the Tokyo brothels.

“Hawks” is a movie full of balloons and picnics, big prostitutes and romps in bordellos. Often, the movie makers seem to be shaking the characters--and the audience--by the lapels, shouting, “Live, damn you, live!”

There’s a weird after-bite to this strategy: Bancroft’s suggestion that the way to face death is to put on a red rubber clown-nose, wallow in graveyard humor and go on wild sprees. It all seems less the conviction of a man facing death than of a man pretending to face it. And, apparently, Clarke’s script is based on an idea by Bee Gee Barry Gibb (who helps supply an ear-nudging score) and writer David English, who decided to test it out on a romp through Amsterdam.

Perhaps because of this jolly-boys genesis, the ambulance spree lacks conviction; if these characters weren’t sick, they’d be the self-indulgent chums of one buddy-buddy comedy after another--and the movie’s title, which suggests that they’re free-flying birds of prey, would get different nuances.

Even with these unjelled, dubious ideas, there’s some warmth and feeling in “Hawks” (rated R for sex and language): in the acting of Edwards, McTeer and Dalton, in the sometimes rich language they’ve been given and in the bright, sympathetic textures of Miller’s direction. If the idea men had seen as much strength in life’s doves, pigeons or even gulls, this movie’s balloons might not have popped so early on.