About Adam.

About Adam * Written and directed by Gerard Stembridge * Starring Stuart Townsend, Kate Hudson, Frances O'Connor, and Charlotte Bradley * Miramax

Adam leads more than a double life: He is a total chameleon. Much of the dramatic tension in About Adam pivots around the discreet tug-of-war for this handsome Dubliner among the three sisters of the Owens family. A fourth sibling--their brother, David, who has sexual problems with his lady--is also mad about the boy. Writer-director Gerard Stembridge, who acknowledges Robert Altman's Short Cuts as his inspiration, adroitly shifts back and forth among the four and their very different perceptions of Adam.

In a reversal of the conventional objectification of women and their accoutrements, the real stars of About Adam are the face, body, and dapper clothing of Irish actor Stuart Townsend. This dark-haired, olive-skinned native of the tiny Irish fishing village of Howth has been declared by several movie magazines and trade papers to be a talent with the "it" that Hollywood craves. After a Brandoesque turn in director Nicholas Hytner's London production of Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending and roles in such fine recent British films as Carine Adler's Under the Skin and Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland, About Adam secures Townsend's status.

Adam's unabashed superficiality--he lives in an elegantly minimalist loft, which also contains his ultrachic photo gallery--paves the way for more complete characterizations of the sisters. Pretty bar chanteuse Lucy (Kate Hudson, in a part filmed before Almost Famous made her almost famous), Adam's fiancee, is probably the emptiest of the three, but she does have a lovely singing voice and an infectious, high-energy personality. More substantial is Laura (talented Aussie Frances O'Connor), a wallflower writing a dissertation on Victorian women and sex. Adam gets her juices flowing after spying on her in the library, memorizing her favorite poems, and reciting them to her. Most complex is eldest sister Alice (Irish thesp Charlotte Bradley), worldly-wise wife to a rich, repellent oaf with whom she is stuck for the good of their baby. More confrontational than her sisters, she too abandons herself after Adam disarms her by owning up to his frivolous nature. "I like giving everyone what they want," he tells her without remorse.

Adam's prowess has an upside: It helps rekindle the sexual lives of all of the Owenses (save Lucy, whose drive never flickers). My only reservations: Plain-faced David, portrayed by Irish newcomer Alan Maher, is, unfortunately, the least interesting Owens, and Stembridge lacks the courage to carry the David-Adam flirtation through to its logical consummation, as Pier Paolo Pasolini did with his Teorema (1968), in which Terence Stamp seduced both male and female members of an Italian family.

The David nonaffair is especially disappointing in light of a still-unproduced screenplay that Stembridge, now 42, wrote in the early '90s, titled The Gay Divorcee. (He made a splash at international festivals in 1995 with his first feature, Guiltrip, about a troubled macho man and the wife he abuses.) Like About Adam, The Gay Divorcee features an un judged "promiscuous" character, but this one--a married hotel worker--favors men and regularly cruises parks at night. Even the gay American journalist with whom he falls in love encourages him to keep running around: He tells him that he's returning to the United States for a year and if the Irishman still wants to settle down after experiencing a lot more casual sex, then the Yank is willing to begin a relationship.

In About Adam, Adam doesn't go beyond mercilessly teasing David in a shared bed. "Please don't tell me I'm queer!" David hilariously pleads with himself in voice-over once he gets an involuntary erection. But Adam just splits, ducks downstairs, and bangs David's girlfriend.

Feinstein also writes for Time Out New York and the New York Daily News.

Find links to more information about Stuart Townsend and Gerard Stembridge at www.advocate.com