MOVIE REVIEW : Neil Simon Gets Serious in ‘Lost in Yonkers’ : Mercedes Ruehl thrives in the film version of the Pulitzer-winning play, for which she and co-star Irene Worth won Tonys.

Aunt Bella (Mercedes Ruehl) in “Lost in Yonkers” (countywide) is in her mid-30s but still lives with her mother (Irene Worth) above the family candy store. She wears dresses that are too florid for her; she’s trying to look more gamin-like, but instead the tactic ages her. She’s sad in a flamboyant, trying-to-be-happy way. Bella isn’t stupid exactly, but her unyielding mother has stunted her will. She’s like a womanly child, and what makes her such a sympathetic character is that she keeps pushing on even though she’s desperately aware of her doubleness.

When Neil Simon’s play opened on Broadway in 1991, it was greeted with the kind of furrowed-brow raves that help rack up awards. (It went on to win the Tony and the Pulitzer.) Simon’s play was supposed to be his most hard-bitten and least self-consciously jokey; he was congratulated for dampening the comedy that made his reputation.

But “Lost in Yonkers” (rated PG for thematic elements and mild language) is essentially deep-dish Neil Simon, which is, after all, not so very deep. But neither is the play negligible; it has a felt, melancholy undertow, and Ruehl and Worth, who both won Tonys for their performances on Broadway, bring out its full, racking sadness.

The drama, which takes place almost entirely in the Westchester, N.Y., suburb in the summer of 1942, begins when the 15-year-old Jay and his 13-year-old brother Arty (the engaging Brad Stoll and Mike Damus) are deposited by their recently widowed father (Jack Laufer) with his unaccommodating mother while he hits the road selling scrap iron to pay off his debts. To the boys, Grandma Kurnitz, with her thick German accent and her brusque scowl and her weapon-like cane, is a character out of a spooky children’s fairy tale; they get a perverse kick out of trying to outwit her, or filch candy without being caught. (They always are.) They’re amused by her but she also scares them.

Aunt Bella is their sidekick protectress, even though she can’t protect herself very well. In interviews, director Martha Coolidge has talked about how she wanted to make audiences view these situations and think of Hansel and Gretel, or Cinderella trapped in her stepmother’s house, and, to some extent, she succeeds. The steel-trap whimsy of the play, with its comfy middle-class insights about how families self-destruct, prevents the fantasia from really taking off. But Coolidge draws out the characters’ most fervent fantasies and keeps them spinning in mid-air. The atmosphere inside that Yonkers apartment where much of the action takes place is thick with dreams: deferred, dashed, rejuvenated.

The other major dreamer besides Bella is her brother Louie (Richard Dreyfuss), a petty hoodlum with a cock o’ the walk strut who hides out for a time in the apartment. Louie is as transparently boisterous as Bella. He’s probably just as afraid of his mother as she is, but he swaddles his fear in his nattering hood act, dispensing tough guy aphorisms to the two boys. (It’s probably what he wishes someone had done for him when he was a boy.) Louie is the most shticky character in the play but Dreyfuss keeps him honest. There’s a childishness to his swagger that links him with Bella--their infantilism is their defense against their mother. In their own very different ways they feel valorous about their infirmities.

Simon makes it clear how psychologically abused these people were as kids but he doesn’t go deep enough. In a way, this new anti-sentimentality is just the flip side of his old sentimentality. Grandma Kurnitz, who never cracks a smile and is proud that she never cries, is a species of ogre. Worth gives this German-Jewish matriarch a deep-down bitterness that’s fiercely authentic but, still, there’s something unshaded and monolithic about her. She’s the villain of the piece, and her children are her victims. (Besides the boys’ father, there’s another sister, played by Susan Merson, who can barely take a breath in her mother’s presence without choking.) The film doesn’t account for the ways in which they might have aggravated their own miseries. The blame is all on one side, as it never is in the great family dramas (think of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” or “Death of a Salesman”). Maybe this is why Coolidge tries to palm the play off as a fairy tale. She pushes the piece into realms where character becomes symbolic, larger-than-life.

Fortunately, Mercedes Ruehl thrives in this expansive setting because she has the ability to make Bella’s desperation hyperbolic. When she’s sneaking a rendezvous with her stammering suitor (well played by David Straithairn), her desire for their threadbare romance to match the romances in the Bette Davis movies she adores is deeply painful. And yet Bella’s passion is her salvation. The play may be set up for her to be a mopey, agitated “little person”--a female Marty--but, the way Ruehl plays her, she’s a hellion for happiness, and a true heroine.

‘Lost in Yonkers’ Mercedes Ruehl: Aunt Bella Irene Worth: Grandma Kurnitz Richard Dreyfuss: Uncle Louie David Straithairn: Johnny

A Columbia Pictures release of a Rastar production. Director Martha Coolidge. Producer Ray Stark. Executive producer Joseph Caracciolo. Screenplay Neil Simon. Cinematographer Johnny E. Jensen. Editor Steven Cohen. Costumes Shelley Komarov. Music Elmer Bernstein. Production design David Chapman. Art director Mark Haack. Set designer Thomas H. Paul, Mark Garner. Set decorator Marvin March. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG (thematic elements, mild language).