MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Light’ Leans Heavily on Shallow Satire

Shirley MacLaine plays a sexy grandma in “Waiting for the Light” (throughout San Diego County)--actually, a sexy grand-aunt--and it is a mark of the movie’s confused attack that it keeps waving her at the audience like a piquant flag.

Slinking through the movie’s make-believe all-American small town, she’s the snake in the grass: perusing trashy paperbacks and tabloids, decked out in hooker’s shades, rainbow-colored tart’s clothes, and bodices cut so low that her bosom threatens to pop out and smother the camera.

The effect isn’t distasteful (MacLaine is still a cinematic eyeful), but it’s definitely exploitative. In her brilliant, touching “Postcards From the Edge” turn as the show-biz mom, she wasn’t afraid to look dazzling in one scene, faded in another. Here, as salty old Aunt Zena--house eccentric of an urban brood that inherits a small-town diner and becomes involved in a phony religious miracle--she is apparently expected to be dazzling and grotesque all at the same time.

The movie tries to have it both ways too: tart one moment, gooey the next. It’s both fairy tale and satire: a rib-nudging fable about a kid’s prank, instigated by Zena, that convinces the credulous townsfolk that angels are visiting their community. The deception snowballs. Dewy-eyed pilgrims descend on Buckley in polite hordes, candles are lit in the now-sacred grove, the diner’s business booms, cynical newsmen snoop, and even world history gets into the act. The whole escalating charade occurs during the Cuban missile crisis, which allows a dubious “dove of peace” angle to get dragged in.

This idea isn’t very original. It suggests movies like “Nothing Sacred” and Billy Wilder’s newspaper hoax drama “Ace in the Hole”--and, most of all, it suggests the episode in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” where provincial children faked a sighting of the Virgin Mary and turned their village into a kind of Carnival of Lourdes.

But Fellini and Wilder were scornful of the frauds they portrayed. Here, writer-director Christopher Monger seems to be spoofing small-town American religious fervor and, not so subtly, playing up to it. At first, Aunt Zena and the kids are portrayed as cutely sadistic pranksters and con artists set loose in the provinces, with hapless, nose-crinkling mom Teri Garr as their exasperated boss. Gradually Monger all but spray-paints love and good will all over his creaky fable. The satire, which tended to limp along anyway--Monger has Frank Capra’s intentions, but not his pacing--is gutted. Its beneficent replacement is unconvincing.

Monger, a Welshman, has little sense of what American small towns and townspeople are like. His Buckley, Wash., seems to have sprung full-blown from a movie never-never land where one-liners sprout up like plastic tulips, dreams come true in dollops of sticky sunshine and the citizenry act like moonstruck boobs.

But, despite the erratic writing and clunky direction, there are some visual and musical coups: MacLaine’s amusingly blowzy routines, the credit montage over “Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb,” numerous felicities in Gabriel Beristain’s (“Caravaggio”) cinematography and an incongruously fine score by Michael Storey (“Another Country”). It’s all for naught. “Waiting for the Light” (rated PG, despite innuendo) ends up as high-concept comedy with a cracked veneer of sincerity. Craftily, it tries to spoof the Almighty, while also bringing him in as a partner on the job.

‘WAITING FOR THE LIGHT’

An Epic Production/Sarlui/Diamant presentation of an Edward R. Pressman production. Producers Caldecott Chubb and Ron Bozman. Director-script Christopher Monger. Camera Gabriel Beristain. Music Michael Storey. Editor Eva Gardos. Production design Phil Peters. Costumes Isabelle Van Soest Chubb. With Shirley MacLaine, Teri Garr, Clancy Brown, Vincent Schiavelli, John Bedford Lloyd, Colin Baumgartner, Hillary Wolf.

Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (Some sexual innuendo.).