FILMMAKERS' BLEAK WORLDVIEW SEEMS PUZZLING.

Byline: Henry Sheehan Orange County Register

When the characters in "Heat" take a break from shooting at each other and blowing stuff up, they tend to retreat to the company of their wives and girlfriends and moan about the general sterility and emptiness of life.

In "Eye for an Eye," the well-to-do husband and wife whose child is brutally raped and murdered live in a world where the police are incompetent, the justice system impotent, and psychotic criminals are free to kill, pillage and ravish.

"12 Monkeys" features a confused hero who returns to 1996 from a not-too-distant future ravaged by a lethal plague. But as bad as the future looks, the vision of today isn't a whole lot better; regardless of whether the plague erupts, the world's prognosis looks pretty dire.

The anxiety underlying these movies is real enough. "12 Monkeys" is absolutely driven by it, while "Heat" is drenched in a kind of chic, color-coordinated depression. "Eye for an Eye," the least well-made of the three, is nevertheless unified by a profound sense of loss.

But the ostensible reasons for these powerful feelings just don't connect. Specifically, the image of modern life they present is not only inadequate to the case but completely unrecognizable under any circumstances. Nearly everyone who leaves the theater after watching these movies walks down streets that are nowhere near as mean as the movies suggest they are.

So, if the dread is real, what possibly could be provoking it in the very successful, wealthy people who produced it? Something much closer to their home, and much farther from ours, most likely.

Most film drama requires risk, of course. Even the characters of "Toy Story" wager stuffed lives and plastic limbs, but its fantasy vision could hardly be described as bleak. The just-released "From Dusk Till Dawn" has more vampires than you can shake a pointed stick at, but the movie's general tone is exuberant, even as some of its protagonists make the gory transition to the undead.

Nor is it written anywhere that a little sourness or pessimism can't be aesthetically useful. "Taxi Driver," to take one example, was hardly a case of unalloyed optimism.

But there was a social, emotional and even spiritual resonance to Travis Bickle's saga that justified the moodiness and made it more than a mere affectation. Moreover, its outlaw characterizations had a reflection in the outsider status of its makers, particularly director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, who were challenging Hollywood norms.

None of that can be said of "Heat." Sure, both "Taxi Driver" and Michael Mann's extravagant crime story star Robert De Niro, but that just shows what a difference a couple of decades can make. No longer is the actor the rebellious outsider; like a host of stars, he mixes purely commercial outings with more artistically inclined endeavors. Even his refusal to leave New York City has become an example of his power; his Gotham-based production company has made him a producer and movie executive.

Moreover, the guiding force behind the film, director Michael Mann, is one of the most successful men in Hollywood, with hit movies ("The Last of the Mohicans") and hit TV shows ("Miami Vice") to his credit. Yet his movie is loaded with broken relationships, suicide-prone children and characters afflicted by a sense of futility.

At least some of the depressing turns of event in "Heat" can occur to even the cossetted Hollywood elite. Even more out of line is "Eye for an Eye," directed by Englishman John Schlesinger, who has had a largely successful career for more than 30 years, and starring the much-rewarded and well-compensated child of Hollywood, Sally Field. That these well-guarded folk would have any reason to so grossly exaggerate the state of the criminal justice system seems highly doubtful.

If you look back over the most optimistic films released by big Hollywood studios during the past year, you begin to notice that many of them were made by non-Americans: "Babe" was Australian, as was the director of "How to Make an American Quilt"; "A Little Princess" and "A Walk in the Clouds" were directed by Mexicans (who would seem much more justified in complaining about life's depredations than Americans); John Sayles turned to Irish folklore for the dreamy "The Secret of Roan Inish."

Perhaps it's not so much the negativity of recent films that make them so weirdly inconsistent with the reality of life, so much as the way that negativity feels forced. Spike Lee's "Clockers," the Hughes brothers' "Dead Presidents" and Nick Gomez's "New Jersey Drive" present a view of life as short, nasty and brutish, but they go out of their way to establish the realistic particulars of their subject areas, largely urban and criminal.

One thing about the makers of "Eye for an Eye" and "Heat": They've been successful in Hollywood for a long time. The same can be said of Bruce Willis, the star of "12 Monkeys," and, in a way, of its co-screenwriter, David Peoples, who penned the scripts of "Blade Runner" and "Unforgiven." Its director, Terry Gilliam, hasn't always been commercially successful, what with the ups and downs of "Brazil" and "the Adventures of Baron Munchausen," but his last picture, "The Fisher King," was a hit, and his career stretches back over 25 years, back to Monty Python.

In Hollywood, success doesn't seem to provoke contentment as much as an anxiety that at times borders on panic. During the Hollywood witch hunts of the late '40s and '50s, many people who named names or otherwise betrayed old friends to stay off the blacklist said they couldn't imagine giving up their careers - and attendant houses and pools. The very idea of it shocked them into behavior many later regretted.

Over the years, in movies such as "Guilty By Suspicion" (starring De Niro, conveniently), this fear over losing possessions was transformed into a more noble, aesthetic passion for filmmaking, but not many people put it that way at the time.

"Heat," "Eye for an Eye," and "12 Monkeys" are all about the dread of loss, the terror that a life that has achieved a hard-fought comfort, luxury or simple equilibrium, respectively, is going to be catastrophically disrupted.

Each film transposes this fear into what is supposed to be an ordinary style of life, even in "12 Monkeys," whose time traveler ends up on the streets of present-day Philadelphia with a very contemporary career woman as a companion.

But these notions of what constitutes "everyday" life never feel right, are never recognizable as reality. To the degree that filmmakers are capable of constructing fables, they manage to put their visions over. But they seem to be deceiving themselves much more than they ever could an audience.

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Photo (1) In "Eye for an Eye," Sally Field finds her well-to-do world shattered when her child is brutally raped and murdered, and she must endure incompetent police, an impotent justice system and psychotic criminals. (2) "From Dusk Till Dawn," with George Clooney, has more vampires than you can shake a pointed stick at, but the movie's general tone is exuberant. (3) "Heat," with Ashley Judd and Val Kilmer, is drenched in a kind of chic, color-coordinated depression.