`CARRIED AWAY,' BUT NOT FAR ENOUGH.

Byline: Henry Sheehan Orange County Register

An emotionally repressed teacher in a small Texas town kicks up some dust when a sexy teen joins his class in ``Carried Away,'' the kind of movie that depicts how wide-open spaces can be spiritual cloisters.

This is well-trodden ground - William Inge's footprints are notable - but the movie, based on a Jim Harrison novel and directed by veteran Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto, has its share of fresh twists.

The problem the movie doesn't solve is the difficulty of creating a film about muted, inarticulate people that doesn't itself become muted and inarticulate. The novelist is free to evoke his characters' thoughts, but a filmmaker is largely stuck with conversation and action.

Not that there isn't spice here. Joseph Svendon (Dennis Hopper) has been leading one of those quietly desperate lives, a middle-age, undereducated teacher who tends his modest farm and ailing mother (Julie Harris) in a lonely quarter of Texas. His romantic life has been restricted to a humdrum, years-long affair with a fellow teacher, Rosealee Henson (Amy Irving), who is satisfied with nothing but a faint promise of marriage in return.

Then, quite literally, one day sex comes knocking at Joseph's door. Catherine Wheeler (Amy Locane) is the teen-age daughter of a retired military man, Maj. Wheeler (Gary Busey), who is renting an isolated farmhouse in an attempt to dry out his alcoholic wife. Catherine, who has one barracuda of a libido, sets her sights on Joseph, more or less dragging him into a barn loft for a roll in the hay.

``Carried Away's'' major virtue comes when the affair is inevitably unmasked. Rather than lead to his ruin, the scandal somehow awakens Joseph, making him realize that however inappropriate his relationship with Catherine was, the emotions he felt could be to his benefit. The problem is that an emotionally resuscitated Joseph doesn't seem that different from the suffocated version.