For Characters in Insightful ‘Maze,’ There’s No Easy Path Through Life

“Maze” is an intelligent and appealing portrait of a young man afflicted with Tourette syndrome who has become a successful painter and sculptor but has told himself to forget about love and to focus on sheer survival.

Writer-producer-director-star Rob Morrow doesn’t pull punches: A woman who goes on a date with Morrow’s Lyle Maze is in danger of his inadvertently knocking a glass of wine all over her while in the grip of an especially strong seizure. It’s no wonder Lyle has retreated from the dating game.

Lyle does have a close friend in Mike (Craig Sheffer), a doctor who has a beautiful live-in lover, Callie (Laura Linney). Mike has been raised with a strong sense of service to others, which in part explains why he’s long been able to take Lyle’s affliction in stride, and he announces to Callie that he feels compelled to sign on for a seven-month tour of duty in Burundi with Doctors Without Borders. She’s less than thrilled with his decision, which he has made without discussing it with her, but sees no point in attempting to dissuade him.

Over the years Callie has become so used to Lyle’s Tourette syndrome that it does not blind her to the fact that he is an attractive, witty, sensitive, caring man. Indeed, she fixes him up with a glamorous friend from work, Julianne (Gia Carides), until she becomes the girl drenched in wine.

As it turns out, Mike departs just as Callie has discovered she is pregnant, and Lyle becomes the person she turns to for moral support. She decides against informing Mike, not wanting him to rush back just out of a sense of duty, but reconsiders her initial decision to have an abortion. In his determination to see Callie through her pregnancy, Lyle not surprisingly falls in love with her against his will, and he is further overwhelmed that she in turn falls for him.

Morrow creates a thorny situation from which there is no easy way out--a predicament in which all concerned are too intelligent and honest with themselves and one another to choose a path of evasiveness. How all this plays out becomes involving because Morrow has created in Lyle and Callie individuals of depth and unselfishness.

In Linney, Morrow has chosen a formidable co-star, an actress who seems to draw upon an unusual degree of self-awareness to endow every character she plays with dimensions beyond what any script could provide.

Both as a writer (with Bradley White) and as an actor, Morrow illuminates all the challenges facing the individual coping with Tourette syndrome while showing that Lyle is much more than the sum of his afflictions.

Lyle stands for anyone with any kind of condition that makes him or her appear significantly different from others and who has given up hoping for love.

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MPAA rating: R, for language and nudity. Times guidelines: Mature themes and situations; nudity occurs only when models are posing for an artist in his studio.

‘Maze’

Rob Morrow: Lyle Maze

Laura Linney: Callie

Craig Sheffer: Mike

Rose Gregorio: Lyle’s mother

Robert Hogan: Lyle’s father

A Blockbuster & Starz! Pictures presentation in association with KBK Entertainment and Andora Pictures International of a Regent Entertainment/Bits and Pieces Picture Co./Goldhart production in association with Cypress Films and Carlyle Productions. Director Rob Morrow. Producers Paul Colichman, Mark R. Harris, Stephen P. Jarchow and Rob Morrow. Executive producers Phyllis Carlyle and Joseph Pierson, David Forrest and Beau Rogers. Screenplay Rob Morrow and Bradley White; from a story by White and Morrow. Cinematographer Wolfgang Held. Editor Gary Levy. Music Bobby Previte. Costumes Melissa Toth. Production designer Kalina Ivanov. Art director Frank White III. Set decorator Phyllis M. Asher. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

At selected theaters.