In the Movies, Everyone Has a Home : Hollywood really doesn’t say much about the problem of the homeless, preferring to make it sugar sweet and serve it up for the masses : FILM COMMENT

What does Hollywood make of homeless people? In the mythology of popular culture, the rich are different from you and me. The idealized poor represent moral rectitude in a land of plenty.

The homeless stand for something far more grim and condemnatory. They are perceived as being beyond poor--beyond class, beyond hope. And yet their spectral teeming presence on the streets testifies to a rotting within the society they seem so marginally, yet fundamentally, a part of.

The “issue” of homelessness, at least for those of us who are sheltered, pulls on our every sinew of political prejudice and guilt. For both the homeless and for those who seek to “understand” them and dramatize them, the moral effort is finally the same: It’s all about the struggle to remain human.

It’s not a struggle Hollywood movies--with their prefab plots and prefab people--are ideally suited for. There is no Hollywood equivalent to an uncompromising shocker like Hector Babenco’s great “Pixote” (1981), about street kids in Rio.

In those occasional modern instances where our movies have touched on homelessness--in such films as “With Honors,” “The Saint of Fort Washington,” “Life Stinks,” “Where the Day Takes You,” the action thrillers “Hard Target” and “Surviving the Game,” “The Fisher King” or, before that, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and the recently revived “Midnight Cowboy”--the idealizations and evasions are startling and yet perfectly understandable as show-biz strategies for coping with the enormity. For the most part, the homeless in our movies are depicted as martyred visionaries, sages or chattel. You won’t learn much from these films about the real causes and conditions of homelessness, but you will learn a lot about how these conditions are camouflaged and candied and served up for a mass audience.

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The current “With Honors,” for example, collides homelessness and Harvard: It’s high concept with a sociology degree. Monty, played by Brendan Fraser, is a senior majoring in political science who plans to work for the government one day to “help people.” (What people? Help how? It’s all kind of fuzzy.) Simon, played by Joe Pesci, is the homeless man who, through a series of implausibilities, latches onto Monty’s only copy of his 100-page senior thesis and, in exchange for favors, hands back to the boy a page at a time--a page for each favor. Pretty soon, Simon is camping out in an abandoned VW van in the front yard of the house Monty shares with three other roommates. Like Monty, they take their time warming up to this ragamuffin. But Monty is fatherless and Simon walked out years ago on his wife and son to join the Merchant Marine and, well, you can figure it out. Bonding, anyone?

Simon represents the homeless as folkloric sage. The twitty, elitist society represented by Harvard--the world of top-dog achievers--exists for him to tweak. He may look like a Dickensian chimney sweep, but he quotes passages from Whitman and he comes bearing the gifts of hard-knocks wisdom.

When Monty takes Simon to his political science class, his conservative professor, played by Gore Vidal in full snoot, chastises the boy for his squishy notions of democracy. Then Simon goes on the attack, lecturing the professor in sporty cadences about having “faith in the wisdom of people.” Simon is in the movie to give Monty life lessons; he’s grooming the good citizenry of the future. And the premed roomie who recoils at Simon gets slammed hard by him: “You know why you hate me? Because you look the way I feel.” Touche !

His truth-telling hooks up to a larger conceit in movies about the destitute: that squalor leads to spirituality. In “The Fisher King” (1991), Robin Williams’ Parry is a knight-errant in his own wild-eyed Manhattan fantasia; his crackbrained quest for the Holy Grail has metaphoric pizazz. He’s the pure-in-heart dreamer whose loony, pained flights are magical transports. He even gets his Grail at the end.

But more than any other film about the homeless, last year’s “The Saint of Fort Washington” really stockpiles the magic-of-madness metaphors. It’s a compendium of practically every haloed homily in the genre.

Matt Dillon’s Matthew, abandoned by his mother, living in vacant tenements, is a diagnosed schizophrenic who takes pictures with a camera with no film in it--metaphor alert!--and hooks up with a black Vietnam vet, Danny Glover’s Jerry, in Manhattan’s prison-like Ft. Washington shelter. Jerry, who takes to calling the boy his son, sees the gentle Matthew for what he truly is: “Maybe you aren’t schizo,” he muses. “Maybe you just a saint.”

And maybe he is. When Jerry’s old shrapnel wounds act up, Matthew lays healing hands on him. The men dream of buying a station wagon and selling fresh produce out of the back. (It’s like “Of Mice and Men” on wheels.) Their friendship has no racial component. Poverty, it seems, not only sanctifies, it also renders you colorblind.

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Standing apart from these sainted scenarios are movies like last year’s “Hard Target” and the current “Surviving the Game” that depict the homeless as the bull’s-eyes of blood sport. The vagrants in these films are still sanctified, but now it’s as if all of society’s viciousness has been unleashed upon them. It’s the kind of exploitation filmmaking that allows an audience to unleash its own frustrations while still pretending social responsibility.

The action-thriller format also gets around another problem inherent in movies about the homeless. It short-circuits the usual slow slide to oblivion by giving its homeless hero a reason not only to survive but to prevail. The point is that no matter how far down you go you still have something to lose--your life.

In these latest pulp reworkings of “The Most Dangerous Game” (1932), the homeless are employed as human prey for the delectation of a gaggle of sickos. In “Hard Target,” one of the prey is a black Vietnam vet; in “Surviving the Game,” the hunted is an inner-city black man, played by Ice-T, who is first seen teaming up with a kindly old white scavenger as they get rousted by the cops for trying to steal food.

The Ice-T character, we eventually learn, went on the skids because the villainous local building inspectors didn’t care about his run-down neighborhood, resulting in the loss of his family in an apartment fire. His employers in the ensuing hunting expedition--this street-smart guy somehow believes he’s being hired as a “survival guide”--have each been selected by the filmmakers to push a different alarm button in the audience.

Rutger Hauer, the blood sport’s ringleader, for example, is the movie’s all-purpose Aryan super-scum. F. Murray Abraham, playing “one of the most feared men on Wall Street,” defends the hunt to his cowardly (i.e., humane) son by explaining that the prey is “less than nothing.” Gary Busey’s role is a twofer: He’s a psychiatrist, and a psychotic, who also works for the CIA.

“Surviving the Game” demonstrates how pulp, irresponsibly but effectively, often gets at an audience’s social prejudices and fears in a way that more genteel movies don’t. The film places you in the position of being both the hunter and the hunted and, in assigning blame for the homeless situation, which it casts in starkly racial terms, it punches up a familiar rogue’s gallery: White supremacists, racist capitalists, mental health workers, predatory government agencies. It’s all there, in paranoid microcosm.

American movies, particularly beyond the Depression years, have often been notoriously leery about pointing up class differences--we are, after all, supposed to be living in a classless society.

And yet the situations of class are unavoidable in movies about homeless people. During the Depression, which is the last time homelessness really made it to our screen in a big way, the class system in America was recognized--but only as a kind of mobile walkway that anybody could ride to riches and prosperity.

A comedy like the 1936 “My Man Godfrey” was emblematic of its era: William Powell played a millionaire scion down on his luck (because of a woman) who is retrieved from a shantytown by a loopy socialite family as the prize in a scavenger hunt and then hired as their butler. (How different the hunt was then!) Like Simon in “With Honors,” Powell’s Godfrey dispenses life lessons and then, reacquainted with his riches, converts the shantytown into a prosperous nightclub with his old hobo buddies as employees.

No matter how bleak the Depression-era movies were, they almost always upheld the traditional institutions of society--the churches, social agencies, the military, even the banks. The struggle in those films for its homeless people was how to fit back into that society, not how to drop out of it.

By the ‘60s, a film like “Midnight Cowboy” could ride the counterculture crest by featuring two essentially harmless dreamers, Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo and Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, awash in a society too depraved to accommodate them.

Corruption was everywhere, from the heartland to the urban jungle to Upper East Side boudoirs. The movie plugged into a sentimental hate-America ethic that gave Joe and Ratso’s dejection a (dubious) social meaning. These homeless waifs wanted to make their home in a society that didn’t deserve them.

In a film like Paul Mazursky’s 1986 comedy “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” the well-off in society still didn’t deserve them, but they coveted them. Nick Nolte’s shaggy-dog Jerry is a hippie mirror image of his Beverly Hills benefactor, played by Richard Dreyfuss. They admire each other’s gumption--the movie is a celebration of gumption. And Jerry, too, transmits life lessons to his benefactors, changing each of their lives for the better.

The appeal in movies about the homeless has always been to a sense of community. (And a sense of community is what we fear we have lost in modern life.) During the Depression, the community was the hobo jungles filled with Forgotten Men, but the larger community was the traditional moneyed society these men (and women) sought to re-enter. In the public mind, these Forgotten were blameless for their plight. In the ‘60s, the homeless were blameless too--they were viewed as outcasts oppressed by society.

The homeless in our current movies operate in a more divided zone. Although typically they are portrayed by Hollywood as essentially blameless for their condition, the society in which they exist is all too ready to blame them, or at least to feel a frustrated compassion. The idealization of the homeless in these movies resembles the ways in which Hollywood tends to idealize minorities in general. There’s an element of condescension and special pleading in the attempt, as if we wouldn’t be interested in these people if they weren’t wiser or purer in heart than we are. The treatment denies their rage--it pastoralizes them. It also represents a kind of charity extended to the homeless. It’s as if a more realistic portrayal would seem unnecessarily cruel--yet one more injury inflicted upon them.

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This idealization is about something else as well. In most movies we are encouraged to regard the characters with no thought that they, in effect, might also be looking back at us. But the presence of the homeless in these movies is implicitly accusatory. In real life we may want to look away when confronted with the real thing--as we enter or leave the movie theater, perhaps. But in the movies we don’t look away, and there’s a measure of guilt--of a judgment received--in our response. The romanticization of homeless people is a way of dignifying those who wait in judgment. We want them to think well of us.

What these movies do not acknowledge is that, in the most complicated sense, they are us.*