MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Rain’ Has Seen Future and It Doesn’t Work

When a movie fails on some dramatic or cinematic level, but still makes interesting social points, the easy way out is to call it “thought-provoking.” That’s what “Rain Without Thunder” (selected theaters) does. It provokes thought, anger, riles us up.

But, on some crucial level, it misses making its own alternate reality. This ideological horror movie intends to shame any abortion-rights audience who won’t go to the trenches. Fifty years in the future, during a time when anti-abortion activists have supposedly won the day and feminism is a dead political movement, two women who go to Sweden for a “termination”--Beverly Goldring and daughter Allison (Betty Buckley and Ali Thomas)--languish in jail on a newly enacted charge of “fetal kidnaping.”

If you don’t act, “Rain” affirms, this is what you face: a future where women who practice non-sanctioned birth control of any kind are imprisoned, dissidents go crazy and barmy crimes like fetal kidnaping are on the books. The title itself comes from a Frederick Douglass quote, which compares people who favor freedom, yet avoid confrontation, with wanting crops without plowing, rain without thunder.

Like “Bob Roberts,” the movie is a fake documentary, with an inquiring reporter (Carolyn McCormick) and a lot of talking heads cluing us in to the Goldrings’ plight and the half-century of social evolution behind it.

That’s the movie’s first problem. Though the show is presumably “objective,” and though writer-director Gary Bennett spreads his eloquence among everyone--the Goldrings’ idealistic attorney (Jeff Daniels), their dour warden (Frederic Forrest) and assorted experts pro and con--the tone always suggests a liberal PBS documentary, circa 1990. It’s as if time had stood still in the media world--and as if the future viewers were somehow ignorant of their own social history, and might be enraged upon learning it. Yet, if we know anything about repressive societies, it’s that the first thing they try to control is the media; here, presumably, American society remains “democratic” in every area but women’s rights.

There’s a second flaw: A bizarre form of class prejudice, in which “Rain’s” heroines are mostly upper-class women besieged by a motley group of resentful lower classes and racial minorities. The Goldrings’ prosecutor is an “ambitious” young black woman (Iona Morris), the main anti-feminist ideologue is Graham Greene as an American Indian pundit, and Allison’s craven, treacherous boyfriend is specifically shown as humble in origin. If his parents were rich, would he have been a more sterling mate?

Bennett probably intends this scheme as ironic. He includes lower-class or minority women among the victims, but somehow they don’t catch the sympathy of the Goldrings: Allison--who looks like a Barnard flower child--or Beverly, whose face is all but haloed. There’s even Crucifixion symbolism at the climax.

The movie’s arguments are stimulating, and so are some of the performances, especially Austin Pendleton’s fervid anti-abortion priest, spouting off “Messiah” theories from Apocalyptic angles, and Linda Hunt as a pedantic future feminist. But “Rain Without Thunder” has all its moral issues solved in advance: a classic case of “preaching to the converted.”

Unlike the best cautionary science-fiction tales--Pohl and Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants,” most of H. G. Wells, Harlan Ellison or Philip Dick--it lets its extrapolations take over the whole story. “Rain Without Thunder” (rated PG-13) is being aimed, all too obviously, at us, now: the Scrooges of the 1990s, being given our dose of nightmare. For provoking thought, it deserves praise. But what the film needs most is some rain with its thunder, some crops with its plowing.

‘Rain Without Thunder’

Betty Buckley: Beverly Goldring

Ali Thomas: Allison Goldring

Jeff Daniels: Jonathon Garson

Linda Hunt: Marilyn Zastrow

An Orion Classics presentation of a Taz Pictures production. Director/screenplay Gary Bennett. Producers Nanette & Gary Sorensen. Executive producers Rick Callahan, Mike Mihalich. Cinematographer Karl Kases. Editors Mallory Gottlieb, Suzanne Pillsbury. Costumes Gail Bartley. Music Randall Lynch, Allen Lynch. Production design Ina Mayhew. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.