On the Streets of ‘Fort Washington’ : The Review: Tim Hunter’s film about a pair of homeless souls in New York has its heart in the right place, but it loses its bite in the fairy-tale presentation.

A lot of talent and good will has gone into “The Saint of Fort Washington” (AMC Century 14), a lower-depths drama about homelessness starring Danny Glover and Matt Dillon. It’s so well-meaning that it makes you want to go out and make a donation to your favorite charity. But its good intentions are double-edged: Like most do-gooder fables, this one wears its righteousness like a red badge of courage.

Jerry (Glover) is a Vietnam vet with a load of shrapnel in his knee who lives from hand to mouth washing car windows at busy New York intersections. Matthew (Dillon) is a diagnosed schizophrenic who lives in abandoned buildings and takes photos with a camera with no film in it.

These two disparate souls meet on their way into the Fort Washington shelter for the homeless and soon become the most bumptiously inseparable couple since Lenny and George in “Of Mice and Men.”

There’s a lot of Steinbeck in this stew (rated R for language). Like Lenny and George, Jerry and Matthew have their dream of living together in bucolic harmony--they’re saving up, dollar by dollar, to rent an apartment and start a business selling veggies out of the back of a station wagon. (No mention of tending any rabbits.) Director Tim Hunter and screenwriter Lyle Kessler give their guys an inspirational glow; amid the New York squalor, and some harrowing scenes photographed in an actual shelter, Jerry and Matthew maintain a beatific goodness. Matthew is, in fact, dubbed the Saint of Fort Washington by Jerry. He’s the holy fool with the healing hands--he quells Jerry’s shrapnel-induced pains when he runs out of painkillers and makes an old man’s arthritis disappear (momentarily).

The filmmakers are so intent on creating a fable that the more realistic aspects of the story lose some of their bite. The gritty New York locations are transformed into a rather twinkly backdrop. Hunter probably didn’t want the grunge to overwhelm the fantasy but the results are discomforting. The story seems too hair-raising for the wispy fairy-tale presentation.

And so we become overly conscious of how acted-out this movie is. The performances, for example, are proficient and yet we can’t help recognizing that these are famous actors playing at being derelicts. Just as we can’t help recognizing that Jerry and Matthew, and just about all the other homeless people whom we see, have good teeth. Good teeth--that’s the tip-off to the show-offy vanity that actors often assume when they take on these down-and-out roles. (When Mel Gibson played the face-charred character in “The Man Without a Face” he was careful to repeatedly show us his uncharred profile.)

It’s not enough that the filmmakers show us two good men trying to navigate their way through the jungle. Matthew has to be sanctified; his schizophrenia, according to Jerry, isn’t really an illness. It’s an illness in the way that Joan of Arc hearing voices was an illness. It’s evidence of a higher calling. Matthew’s condition is romanticized as a way of humanizing him--and deifying him too. “The Saint of Fort Washington” would have been a better film if it extended its compassion to those on the streets who are less sanctified but no less human.

‘The Saint of Fort Washington’

Danny Glover: Matthew Matt Dillon: Rosario Rick Aviles: Tamsen Ving Rhames: Little Leroy

A Warner Bros. presentation of a David V. Picker/Nessa Hyams production in association with Carrie Productions. Director Tim Hunter. Producers David V. Picker and Nessa Hyams. Executive producers Lyle Kessler and Carl Clifford. Screenplay Lyle Kessler. Cinematographer Fred Elmes. Editor Howard Smith. Music James Newton Howard. Art director Steve Saklad. Set decorator Debra Schutt. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).