Passion Fish.

What is it that makes American movies, on the whole, less interesting than their European or Asian counterparts? That, however much they try to disguise it (although most of them don't even bother), they are plot-driven. They dream up some really crazy, wild, funny, scary, adorable, tear-jerking characters, then forget about them as evolving or floundering, rational or rationalizing beings, and merely move them around like counters, counterclockwise or clockwise, to fit the exigencies of a baroque, Byzantine, or brainless plot.

And though the dialogue may be tough, snappy, arch, halting, adorably inane, Hemingwayesque, Mametian, or prehistoric, it is seldom understated, poetic, pregnant with unvoiced feeling, achingly indirect as so much ordinary yet heartfelt speech is. This dialogue, too, merely subserves the plot, directly or deviously, but does not afford revelations into character, into striving or sputtering souls.

Yet once in a while American film does break through the mold. Such a case is Passion Fish by John Sayles, whose previous pictures have all been arresting, but more or less flawed. Sayles is a novelist as well as a filmmaker, and it shows in his better movies: they are written as well as shot. But Sayles is canny about dialogue: it must not reveal its literariness if it is to be photogenic. True, there have been a few filmmakers able to stir up waves of verbiage that do not overpower the image or scatter into redundant spume. One thinks of Jacques Prevert in France, a handful of Central and Eastern European filmmakers, and, of course, Bergman.

Passion Fish is the story of May-Alice, a soap-opera actress in New York, whose taxi is side-swiped by another one as she is getting out, and who wakes up in a hospital. She is paralyzed from the waist down. We find this out gradually; the film begins from her point of view, and immediately Sayles's mastery asserts itself. Shot after shot is a close-up or near close-up as May-Alice's hand gropes for the call button on her night table, and overturns a glass and water jar in the process. Her daytime serial is on, featuring a doctor sequence very different from her real-life situation. Throughout the film, television images, voices, and people whether from her show or from others--act as an ironic commentary on reality.

For a while, then, nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists (significantly no doctors) surround May-Alice, but are only faceless voices and pairs of arms, admirably conveying the patient's isolation and self-absorption in the midst of zealous, yet ultimately meaningless, assistance. Although (unlike Ronald Reagan) she does find her legs under the covers, they are useless, and her helplessness and despair are eloquently conveyed by various means, not least the number of f-words she hurls forth in impotent rage. Then, with great economy, the movie takes us through the effortful stages of physical therapy, during which May-Alice, at first reluctantly cooperative, refuses to do the necessary to fully regain her upper-body strength. All this is unsentimental and unsensational, leavened  with May-Alice's irony, her gallows humor; yet how quickly her bravado can crumble, leaving her sitting or lying in sobs or stupor.

Eventually, she decides to return to her ancestral home in Louisiana's bayou country. The place is a shambles, and her manager did not have ramps installed; what special equipment he did get, lies strewn about. There is a sound, tough woman physical therapist whom May-Alice, however, visits only to satisfy the insurance requirements. Still, she now needs a nurse-companion, and the agency sends her some. We get a hilarious parade of egregious unsuitables, none of whom lasts long, though each contributes to the chief theme: how do we tell sick from healthy, normal from abnormal, reality (the heroine's predicament) from the helpers' fantasies? For these women either bully or neglect her, or, worse, use her as some sort of therapy for themselves.

At last a very different sort of nurse presents herself to a May-Alice almost resigned to drowning her affluent, embittered idleness in alcohol and TV-watching, and ignoring the outside world and its inhabitants. This Chantelle is a youngish black woman from Chicago--a quiet, self-possessed person who takes her job rather more seriously than even May-Alice wants her to. She doesn't lavish undue sympathy on her employer, or try to bully or wheedle her into exercise, eating, living. But by an approach almost as wryly sardonic as May-Alice's own sarcasm, she gets things done. The women's relationship is an armed truce. Chantelle needs her job and does it well even though she's never had one quite like it. May-Alice appreciates her efficiency, but resents her closed-mouthedness and rough-hewn methods as much as Chantelle scorns this white-wine-and-television-saturated white woman, known at the agency as "a bitch on wheels."

They fence verbally. Chantelle can't cook, and responds defensively: "Is there a rule that all black people got to know how to cook?" May-Alice doesn't rise to the bait: "Down here there's a rule that everyone got to know how to cook." Chantelle is equally cagy: "I kind of gross you out, don't I?" May-Alice moans, and the nurse responds sweetly, "Is this a trick question?" Step by step, Chantelle gets May-Alice to do her exercises, sit on her beautiful lakefront by the jetty, become more self-sufficient. But it's hard, and there is a cautiousness, even banteringness, about their acrimony as, underneath, they begin to see each other's good sides. Both women, however, are lonely and sexually deprived. May-Alice even remarks in rowdy detail about not being able to feel anything down there.

Yet when Chantelle brings Rennie to the house--Rennie who was everybody's, including May-Alice's, highschool heartthrob-something stirs in the paraplegic. True, Rennie is married, with five children; but he is the town carpenter and repairman, and soon Chantelle has him building a ramp to the front porch. Chantelle herself meets "Sugar" LeDoux, the much-married, always charmingly randy local blacksmith ("You're a black something, all right!"), and she herself slowly thaws out. I mustn't tell you more, except that everything happens by finely observed degrees, as in ordinary life, even though neither of the two women is ordinary. For Chantelle has a murky past from which she must extricate herself.

Sayles--as writer, director, editor-- has a sure sense of rhythm. He knows exactly where to cut off a scene to create an emotional double exposure, where to speed up or grow leisurely, and how to convey an ambience--the sprawling house, the exotic landscape, a Zydeco band and dance--without rubbing your nose in it. Though it is alert to it, the film is not about atmosphere; still less is it about good, simple folks helping May-Alice to get well. Neither the TV people from up North, who come to visit or solicit, nor the local belles, who come out of nosiness and to gossip, are any use. Even the drunken wastrel of an uncle who introduces May-Alice to his hobby, photography, is more help.

Sayles gets splendid support from his fine British cameraman, Roger Deakins. The two are careful to make the visual elements striking, but not lush. The weather is often grey, the vegetation washed-out looking, the house dark but not cozy. Yet when beauty is called for, it is there. Still, even May-Alice's neglected boat, whose rusty motor Rennie fixes, is nothing special. Neither is the car, or the garage that becomes a darkroom. And the lake is full of snakes. Above all, both women are prey to fits of frustration and dejection. There is one brief, wonderful night scene that shows Chantelle as lonely in her little upstairs bedroom as May-Alice is in the big drawing-room watching TV. Chantelle sits on her bed in silhouette, startlingly black against a strange, milky glare: the moon? A night-light? May-Alice's head is lit up fitfully by the TV set, the fluctuating brightness of the images (which we do not see) rippling across her teary face like a tide of uncertainty. Two not quite identical lonelinesses are keenly, visually, contrasted.

There are no big climaxes, only modest mini-ones. Such is a boat ride and island picnic for May-Alice, Chantelle, and Rennie, who is also the local tourist guide, pointing out nature and evoking legends. The interaction among the trio is conveyed lovingly but realistically. Here as elsewhere, little is said, but remarks have a double bottom. Something subliminal is rampant in all three. And here as elsewhere, the film is a blend of sensitivity, wit, and toughness--an unbeatable combination. When a motor breakdown on Rennie's boat delays the return trip till night, and the boat's Cyclopean reflector picks out the nocturnal sights--perhaps no more than a pair of owls motionless on a mangrove branch--a spell is made tangible. Yet nothing overt happens. The performances down to the minutest ones are just right. But the three principals are marvels. Mary McDonnell makes May-Alice a decent, intelligent, ordinary woman, neither glamorous nor unduly actressy, and not the least bit noble. Her anger and irony are always palpable, as are, later, her coming to life and warmth. But best are her awkwardnesses, sometimes her total helplessness, photographed with the same stark candor with which they are acted. Alfre Woodard's Chantelle is, if possible, even more remarkable. Almost everything she says has a touch of acidity or mockery, yet the actress makes you unfailingly aware of the fragility underneath. She has enormous eyes that bulge a little and contain worlds; they speak much more than her mouth, and seem always a mite anxious, a couple of jumps ahead of tears. But her tears, like her smiles, are rare and faint; nevertheless, the screen is swamped by them.

How subtly the balance of power between the women keeps shifting: now one, now the other is more dependent, needy. And how, almost imperceptibly, they become equals, without any grand sisterly effusion ever. And then the altogether admirable Rennie of David Strathairn. This is the most natural, unactorish performance to be seen anywhere, with every emotion adumbrated, but kept in rigorous-- and quite spontaneous-check. Especially lovely is the way the actor's face, body, hands are always doing something natural, useful, unemphatic, human.

How well Sayles writes and directs a scene! Take the coming of Chantelle's father and daughter for a visit. Their arrival by bus, a silent scene in long shot, is a model of camera placement, movement of actors, and wordless, visual comment. Or take the nearest thing to a love scene between May-Alice and Rennie during a crowd frolic. The two voices are very small, colorless, almost throwaways: "Rennie, you don't have to have a job or something to fix to come out and visit." "Yeah? Well, I'll do that then." "Do it real soon." That is all. But, like an assagai, it finds the heart.

Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine.