THE WISDOM OF THE AGED : 'Shower' & 'Space Cowboys'.

China, we read every day, is in the midst of convulsive economic change, change that is altering that vast nation's geographical as well as social and political terrain. Zhang Yang's new film, Shower, takes us behind the dizzying export statistics and the tales of Dickensian factories to tell the story of how one family deals with economic and social forces that seem as inexorable as time itself.

Shower opens with Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin), the film's pensive protagonist, entering a phone booth-like shower stall on a busy city street. Inside he is sluiced, scrubbed, massaged, rinsed, and blown dry with the automated precision associated with a modern car wash. Welcome to the new China, where every traditional human need can be catered to efficiently, cheaply, and impersonally, thanks to the efforts of a million eager entrepreneurs.

Da Ming, always dressed crisply in a white shirt and pressed pants with cell phone at the ready, is one of the young men who make China hum to the fast-paced tune of "progress." Like countless others, he has gone "south" to make his fortune. A postcard from his younger brother Er Ming (Jiang Wu) brings him back to Beijing to check on his elderly father's health. The father, known as Master Liu (Zhu Xu), runs a dilapidated bathhouse in a rundown section of the city. Er Ming, who is mentally retarded, works alongside his father, the two often cavorting more like siblings than father and son. Reimmersed in this intense domestic setting, Da Ming exudes a college freshman's disdain for his family's parochial existence. Life in the tumbledown bathhouse seems hopelessly anachronistic. The father's solicitous attitude toward his customers appears almost craven and the younger brother's guffawing antics pathetic. Seeing that his father's health is good, Da Ming is anxious to return to the world that is reshaping every aspect of Chinese society beyond the bathhouse.

Events conspire to keep Da Ming in Beijing longer than he wants, and in doing so reconnect him to his family in profound and touching ways. The day-to-day life of the bathhouse, with its devoted customers and intimate, hands-on rituals, reveals a whole other side to life, a side that rarely shows up in economic statistics or celebrations of economic progress. The bathhouse is, in fact, the center of a community, a place where gossip is exchanged, games are played, and essential social bonds forged. Master Liu is not burdened by his menial labors but sanctified by them. "The water not only washes your body but also your soul," he testifies. In its easygoing and whimsical way, Shower reveals why the bathhouse matters and why modern convenience can only destroy the social meaning of Master Liu's vocation.

Far from being a servile presence, Master Liu is respected and trusted by his customers, adored by his needy younger son, and sure of his own worth. "Whenever I see an old customer I am happy," he explains. "They are still special." With the wisdom of someone who has known want and deprivation, the father is grateful for what he has: "I can eat. I can sleep. And I can work." When three young toughs assault a bathhouse customer who owes them money, Master Liu stands up to them with quiet dignity. Not in my place, he tells the intruders. In the numinous world of the bathhouse, even the local thugs recognize the deeper order of things.

Shower's poignant revelations emerge effortlessly in a film suffused with gentle, funny moments; the best is one that touches on the universal appeal of singing "O Sole Mio" in the shower. The near universality of director Zhang Yang's story also makes itself strongly felt. Countless American movies and novels have depicted the lives of young men or women who move beyond an ethnic or working-class enclave into a bigger and more cosmopolitan world. What one generation considers the very definition of success--a steady job and a roof over one's head--the next often finds constricting, if not suffocating. Will the relationships and values that nurtured us in one setting sustain us in the next? Reconciling such disparate worlds is never easy, and Shower comes close to settling for an easy, sentimental answer. Not all virtue resides in the renunciation of new things. The old loyalties can be quite manipulative in their own way. But certain human truths do abide, especially if they can be expressed with laughter, and Shower reminds us of the moral necessity of simple things like shared food and manual work and the care of those who cannot care for themselves.

Precious little is simple about space travel. From charting a course out of the earth's atmosphere and back again, to the engineering feats involved in designing and building rockets and vehicles like the Space Shuttle, the exploration of outer space is surely one of the most technically esoteric enterprises ever to fall under the "adventure" category. Not long ago exploration didn't require much more than a dog sled, a compass, a modest stake, and a whole lot of gumption. Today you need a Ph.D. or two and several multibillion-dollar industries behind you.

How do you make something so inherently complex intelligible and dramatically compelling on the big screen? The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 put personalities, personal conflicts, and the threat of catastrophic failure center stage. Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys tries to do the same, but the personalities are caricatures and the catastrophe wholly contrived.

Let me confess at the outset that I am something of a Clint Eastwood fan, and was one long before Unforgiven won Eastwood an Oscar and promoted him to the status of the thinking man's gunslinger. But Clint without a gun is a bit like George W. Bush without a smirk: you just feel you're not getting the real thing. In Space Cowboys, Eastwood, who also produced and directed the film, stars as Frank Corvin, an expert test pilot and engineer whose conflict in the late 1950s with an Air Force superior ruins his chances of becoming one of the first astronauts. Fast-forward forty years and we find Corvin, still fit but very wrinkled, whiling away his retirement in sunny California. Improbably, his old nemesis Bob Gerson (played with Simon Legree-like subtlety by James Cromwell) is still at NASA. The post-cold-war world finds Gerson suspiciously working hand in hand with the Russians. His immediate problem is stopping a Russian satellite from losing its orbit and falling to earth. Why the satellite cannot be allowed to disintegrate on reentry and how it ended up with a guidance system designed by Corvin in the 1960s is never adequately explained. Needless to say, not all is what it appears to be. But in refusing to provide any logical reasons for the satellite rescue mission soon to be mounted, the film squanders all plausibility and suspense.

Gerson needs Corvin's help to fix the satellite, but Corvin agrees to help only if NASA sends him and his old Air Force cronies into space. If John Glenn could be sent up at seventy-seven, Corvin reasons, why can't he and his fellow sexagenarians? Corvin gleefully assembles his team of senior citizens, which includes James Garner, Donald Sutherland, and Tommy Lee Jones. All of these wizened actors are put through their paces in preparation for the flight, and the banter and macho camaraderie are appealing enough if you take to that sort of thing. Unfortunately, Sutherland plays a pony-tailed satyr of only limited charm, and Garner, who is a fine comic actor, is never really put to work. Eastwood and Jones are the only ones given anything vaguely interesting to do, with Jones stealing most of the scenes--no easy task even when Eastwood is feigning sleep.

Once beyond the earth's atmosphere things get dicy as the all-too-lovable codgers encounter the deadly surprises Gerson has placed in their extraterrestrial path. All of this culminates in the absurd picture of Tommy Lee Jones strapping himself to a mammoth rocket and shooting off to the moon. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio swimming home with the Titanic in tow. Even Eastwood's charisma isn't strong enough to keep this ship afloat.