RICHNESS ELUDES `THE GAMBLER'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

On rare occasions, art and the life of the artist can be cinematically interwoven with profoundly moving results. ``Amadeus,'' some of Ken Russell's composer bio-films and last year's ``Godsand Monsters'' are among the few magnificent examples.

``The Gambler'' will not be joining them.

It's an ambitious but unerringly trite attempt to mirror Fyodor Dostoevski's desperate efforts to write ``The Gambler'' on deadline with the wagering and romantic fervor described in the novel. And it's not necessarily a bad idea, seeing as how the great novelist's story grew out of his own compulsion, and its passions genuinely did have real-life correspondence with the beginning of Dostoevski's troubled, debt-plagued relationship with his stenographer, Anna Snitkina.

But the storytellers here - longtime Hungarian director Karoly Makk, writers Katharine Ogden, Charles Cohen and Nick Dear - keep connecting scenes from the novel with the Russian's sordid-but-creatively-vital life in the most obvious ways.

As Dostoevski (played with dilapidated middle-age brio by the fine Irish actor Michael Gambon) dictates his fevered drama of self-immolation to young, sheltered and increasingly excited Anna (Jodhi May, bright and earnest and a little too proto-feminist for 1860s St. Petersburg), her 20-year-old imagination flutters into overdrive.

Of course, her heart soon follows suit, and it's not hard to figure out why. Not only is Fyodor intriguingly grumpy-brilliant and vulnerable, too (epilepsy acting here as a kind of pheromone for her caregiving impulse), the tale he spews out is a real corker, all about unlucky Russian nobles getting taken to the cleaners at a posh German gambling spa.

In the passages from the book, beautiful Polina (Polly Walker) is in love and indebted to sleazy French pseudo-aristocrat De Grieux (Johan Leysen). Family retainer Alexei (Dominic West) loves Polina, but will trying to gamble her debts away win her heart or just get him hooked on roulette?

And when the solution to all these problems and more - a rich, hopefully dying grandmother, played by double-Oscar winner Luise Rainer in her first screen appearance in more than ahalf-century - appears in Roulettenburg just healthy enough to blow the rest of the family's fortune, well, what properly raised Russian girl wouldn't start breathing heavily?

The film is neither as soapy nor sappy as the preceding sentences may imply. But neither does it do anything like justice to the deeply tormented and inspirational marriage that would influence such masterworks as ``The Idiot,'' ``The Possessed'' and ``The Brothers Karamazov.''

Through no fault of the actors, the richness of the creative process - which we'll acknowledge is one of the most difficult things in human experience to portray dramatically on film - too often escapes Makk's staging. It's stodgy, artsy filmmaking from another era, over-reliant on ``significant'' slow-motion and dissolves that make cheap ironic contrasts between Dostoevski's grubby reality and the glamorized casinos of his mind.

This all serves to flatten what could have been, what should have been, an eruptive tale of art, love and struggle. After all, the real story was one of literary history's most profound.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The Gambler'' (unrated; sex, language, nudity, drug use).

The stars: Michael Gambon, Jodhi May, Polly Walker, Dominic West, Luise Rainer.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Karoly Makk. Written by Katherine Ogden, Charles Cohen and Nick Dear. Produced by Cohen and Marc Vlessing. Released by Independent Artists.

Running time: One hour, 37 minutes.

Playing: Laemmle's Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

Our rating: Two stars.