MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Texasville’: Midlife Crises : Film: In the sequel to ‘The Last Picture Show,’ director Peter Bogdanovich’s homecoming is a boon and a bust.

In the opening of “Texasville” (selected theaters), Jeff Bridges’ Duane Jackson, in his hot tub, is shooting indifferently at his new two-story doghouse with a .44 Magnum. Lord knows Duane’s got acreage enough so that he won’t hit anything he doesn’t mean to, but it’s a signal that all is not well in Anarene, Tex.

There’s very little right--or even comprehensible--with other “Texasville” characters either, many of whom audiences will remember from “The Last Picture Show” which traced their lives some 30 years earlier.

Between then and “Texasville’s” 1984, the oil boom and bust have hit Anarene. Both cataclysmic events have spawned some pretty peculiar behavior. Ordinary townspeople who’d expected to live “more or less orderly, more or less responsible lives,” can be found whirling in and out of each other’s beds or pickup trucks, on the edge of what seems to be widespread nervous collapse.

Underneath all this irrational behavior is oil-driven anxiety; more than half the town is bankrupt, the other half expects to be before sundown. Unfortunately, that was far clearer--and funnier--in Larry McMurtry’s book than in Peter Bogdanovich’s film. Director-screenwriter Bogdanovich has crowded the screen with so much activity and so many auxiliary characters that we’re pushed well past the point of keeping track of them--or caring.

We want to know about Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd), back home to heal her soul. Has she got Duane in her sights again or is she simply exercising her talent for lazy flirtation? What should we make of her instant closeness with Karla (Annie Potts), Duane’s terrific wife of 20 years?

To find out, we have to fight our way through a welter of glossy Texas women who are sleeping with either Duane or his 19-year-old son Dickie (William McNamara), or with both. And there are these women’s gun-totin’ husbands. If you think of them as gnats, you’ll have an easier time of it.

For audiences too young to remember the 1971 “Picture Show,” Bogdanovich may have skimped on some needed refreshers, especially about Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), whose performance doesn’t really register. Over these 30 years, Duane has become a husband, a father, a millionaire and a very young grandfather. But we meet him $12 million in debt and unsettled by that idea, by middle age and by the behavior of every woman around him, including his wife’s.

Jacy, Duane’s capricious high-school sweetheart, has gone on to become a minor movie star. She’s come back to Anarene from Italy where she’s been living, wracked by a death in her family. Bachelor Sonny Crawford, Duane’s best buddy and rival for Jacy in high school, is fraying at the seams; as Duane says, “Sonny’s a little tired in his mind.”

Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid), now an overstressed bank president and Genevieve Morgan (Eileen Brennan) are on screen only briefly. Only Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman, particularly fine) seems to have traversed the time-span successfully. Once the older woman in an adulterous affair with Sonny, she’s been widowed for years and Duane’s secretary through thick and thin.

“Texasville’s” problem isn’t that its tone is darker and more reflective. It’s that unhappiness and inertia aren’t particularly dramatic and mindless partner-swapping isn’t particularly engaging. “The Last Picture Show’s” high-schoolers, facing the Korean War, were groping for sex as avidly as these adults; they were also groping for tenderness and human contact. “Texasville’s” adults seem to be simply groping, although not in ways that warrant the film’s R rating.

The movie’s grace rests with the performances of Bridges, Potts and Shepherd. Thirty pounds pudgier for the part, Bridges’ Duane, like most McMurtry men, is baffled and buffaloed by the tart-tongued women around him. The sight of Jacy and his wife--mysterious and allied--with their heads together, most likely comparing notes about his defects, makes Duane real edgy.

Potts’ Karla, mother of four hell-raising kids, is a pistol. Karla’s been putting her feisty messages to the world--”You Can’t Be First--But You Can Be Next”--where the world can’t fail to notice them, on her black, sprayed-on T-shirts. Duane’s desultory affairs don’t thrill her, but she’s in for the long haul, clearly Duane’s match and the motor of their marriage.

Burnished by time and the loss she’s suffered, Shepherd’s Jacy is still a heartbreaker, wicked enough to seduce Duane’s very own dog away from him. Her devastating closing scene, watching Duane and Karla’s twins simply being kids, is an announcement of how far Jacy--and Shepherd--have come.

In contrast, the movie’s big set-piece, the Old Texasville Centennial, which should contain a certain visual irony about the New West, is endless and cartoony. Like Sonny’s moving pictures in his mind, Bogdanovich sees things we can’t; when we can join him--in moments of family and connectedness--”Texasville” is touching. Most other times it’s the darndest mess you ever saw.