MOVIE REVIEW : A Powerful Dance to Life

When you call “The Waterdance” uplifting, smile. When you are tempted to describe it as a tribute to the human spirit, bite your tongue. When you confuse it with well-meaning but wimpy motion pictures that do the Lord’s work in the most lethargic way, go hang your head in shame.

The truth about this remarkable piece of work is that it is the last film anyone has to make excuses for. Wickedly funny, undeniably moving, featuring a knockout series of performances and the most sensual of love scenes, it has everything audiences have been missing in American films. It just happens to be about three men in wheelchairs.

Neal Jimenez, “The Waterdance’s” screenwriter and co-director (along with Michael Steinberg), has been in a chair himself since an accident in 1984. Already a nervy, accomplished screenwriter with the disturbing “River’s Edge” to his credit, Jimenez based “The Waterdance” (opening Friday at Hillcrest Cinemas, rated R for language and sensuality) on his own experience. Yet his closeness to the situation resulted not in any mushy special pleading, but its exact opposite: an unforced, unsentimental film whose flat refusal to overdramatize ends up enhancing its considerable power.

“The Waterdance’s” first image is a bracing static one: a close-up of a battered head immobilized in a peculiar traction device known as a halo. A small hand tentatively strokes this wary, immobile face. “Hi, honey,” the hand’s off-screen voice says timidly. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

The head belongs to Joel Garcia (Eric Stoltz), a young novelist with a broken neck. The hand belongs to Anna (Helen Hunt), a sweet and spirited woman who is seriously in love with Joel but married to someone else. With that torturous situation as a backdrop, they both have to deal with the confounding fact of Joel’s confinement to the chair, permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Anna is determined to stand by him, but even in the best of circumstances, this is not an easy man to love. Demanding, coolly sarcastic, ever ready to say needling things like “I’d feel sorry for him but I’m saving all my pity for myself,” Joel would be a handful even in perfect health. Faced with six months in Holbrook Hospital and a considerable leap into the unknown after that, his relationship with Anna becomes even more intensely topsy-turvy, an emotional bomb with a hot-wired fuse.

Given all that, as well as the way Jimenez’s screenplay refuses to downplay the inescapable anger that finding yourself suddenly changed for life calls forth, it is a tribute to Stoltz (who reportedly never used his legs during production even when off the set) that he makes Garcia not only believable but clearly sympathetic as well.

Helping him considerably along the way is Hunt’s understated but very affecting work as Anna, a performance that manages to project selflessness as strength and scrupulously avoids any hint of dishrag self-sacrifice. The two have acted together before (in a 1989 Broadway production of “Our Town”) and that familiarity must have helped the “The Waterdance’s” pair of exceptional love scenes, sequences so delicately erotic that you can hear a pin drop both on-screen and off.

But Joel must do more than just try to sort out his life with Anna. He is forced, whether he likes it or not, to interact with the other men on his ward, and it is a mark of “The Waterdance’s” across-the-board power that his relationship with Anna comes close to being overshadowed by the outstanding acting and writing that characterize the appearance of Bloss and Raymond Hill.

Certainly, no two men could be more dissimilar both to each other and the cagey, distant Joel. Bloss (an even better performance than usual from the always formidable William Forsythe) is a surly, racist biker (complete with beer belly, tattoos and an ever-present mom) whose Harley was totaled by a Mercedes-Benz and who dreams of a litigious revenge.

Hill, by contrast, is a trash-talking, streetwise and self-confident black man. Cavalier about his wife and young daughter before the accident that paralyzed him, he feels “God is slowing me down so I can appreciate them.” Though at first he seems a bit of a clown, Hill turns out to be a man of infinite parts and energetic emotions, and the protean Wesley Snipes, projecting everything from bravado and despair to tenderness and angry tears, makes him close to unforgettable.

The funny, sad, passionate story of “The Waterdance,” then, ultimately turns out to be about the way these three men, in coming to terms with one another, come to terms with what has happened to their lives. As Raymond Hill, who often serves as Jimenez’s mouthpiece (and whose haunting dream gives the film its title) puts it, “Every man got to find his place.” Watching these basically ordinary men, not celebrities or superstars, find theirs is as deeply satisfying a movie experience as this or any summer is likely to offer.

‘The Waterdance’

Eric Stoltz: Joel Garcia

Wesley Snipes: Raymond Hill

William Forsythe: Bloss

Helen Hunt: Anna

Elizabeth Pena: Rosa

Released by the Samuel Goldwyn Co. Directors Neal Jimenez, Michael Steinberg. Producers Gale Anne Hurd, Marie Cantin. Executive producer Guy Riedel. Screenplay Neal Jimenez. Cinematographer Mark Plummer. Editor Jeff Freeman. Music Michael Convertino. Production design Bob Ziembicki. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language and sensuality).