COMMENTARY : Making Sense of Sadness : Movies: Although the contrasts in their deaths are considerable, Federico Fellini and River Phoenix had a common bond--they touched our real and movie lives.

Death is supposed to be the great equalizer, but that’s never true. Death is random, capricious, unconcerned, a flagrant player of favorites. It keeps its own counsel, so much the better to profoundly shock by its actions.

Under any circumstances, the sudden death of as gifted an actor as River Phoenix at age 23, younger even than James Dean, would be confounding, but for him to die on the same day as the venerable 73-year-old virtuoso Federico Fellini is especially unsettling.

Though in a celebrity-obsessed culture we tend to pay too much attention to the deaths of the famous and not enough to those the media deem unworthy, this coincidence is too macabre to be ignored, too topsy-turvy to be shrugged off. Like a speaker of an unknown language we strain to understand, this pair of deaths seems to be telling us something we can’t quite manage to hear.

Certainly the ironies in the situation are considerable. Here is Fellini, the iconoclast, the breaker of boundaries, the master of excess, dying eminently respectable at a ripe age and with enough advance warning of the imminent end to allow all the major outlets plenty of time to prepare the tributes he without question deserves.

Then there is River Phoenix, whose story is different in almost every respect but ability. His death can have been anticipated by no one. An actor whose on-screen roles always reflected the kind of innate decency neither money nor publicity can purchase, he collapsed outside a West Hollywood nightclub. He may well have been as shocked as the dying Edward G. Robinson, who said at the end of “Little Caesar,” “Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?”

Fellini, by contrast, as his five Oscars (including an honorary one just this year) attest, had not one brilliant career but several. He began in neo-realism and even did wonderful if almost forgotten knock-about comedies like “The White Sheik,” about a woman who falls in love with the star of a live-action comic strip, that retain a liveliness of spirit to this day.

Then came his signature pieces--”La Strada,” “La Dolce Vita,” “8 1/2”--works that expanded the world’s idea of what film could do. And after years of wanderings in the gardens of wretched excess exemplified by “Satyricon” and “Roma,” a journey the lionizing he received perhaps made inevitable, the director turned yet another corner. He thought again of his childhood and with “Amarcord” made one of the most exact and precious of memory films.

And unlike so many directors, especially in this country, Fellini never had to retire because of advancing age, never had to content himself with a life of adoring festival tributes and worshipful monograph writers. He worked almost to the end, and if he didn’t quite have the satisfaction Mark Twain had of literally reading his own obituaries, he came close. Though one is inevitably sad when as vital a creator as this dies, if ever there was a man who was not shortchanged by life, or by death, Fellini was one.

River Phoenix’s death, by contrast, leaves us feeling horribly cheated, bereft of the kind of luminous performances he would surely have given had he lived. Never a member of the Brat Pack, unwilling to have a highly publicized private life, he was arguably the best actor of his generation, someone who never walked on screen without touching an audience’s heart.

In 1985, as a reporter working on a magazine profile of Harrison Ford, I met Phoenix for the first and only time on the set of “The Mosquito Coast.” Though I was fascinated by his background, by his unconventional parents who had named their other children Leaf, Summer, Rain and Liberty, I was most taken by this remarkable 14-year-old, at once lively and serious and without a trace of attitude or condescension.

It was this kind of honesty, this ability and desire to go after emotional truth, that marked all of Phoenix’s roles. He seemed to pick his parts not for flash or career advancement, but because they allowed him to expand his explorations of human behavior, even if, as in “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon” and “Dogfight,” they ended up being in films too idiosyncratic to attract a large audience.

Phoenix, of course, appeared in box-office powerhouses ranging from “Stand by Me” to “Sneakers,” and in major critical hits like “My Own Private Idaho.” His best performance, however, remains the one he was nominated for an Oscar for, as a child of fugitive political radicals in “Running on Empty.” Thinking of his work there, especially of his emotional scenes with Martha Plimpton, and knowing that this is all we are going to get is enough to make you weep.

One reason we as a society make such a fuss over actors and filmmakers when they die is that while they were alive we looked to them on some level to make sense of our lives, to help us by the work they do on screen to cast some light on the struggles all of us endure.

And by dying in such an almost perverse combination, Federico Fellini and River Phoenix perform that function in death as well as life. They remind us that though we may think of our days as a walk down a broad highway, we are actually moving on the very edge of a steep precipice whose existence we mostly refuse to acknowledge. Two very different men fell off that cliff yesterday, and our real lives and our movie lives can never be the same.