Tender mercies.

I HAD HIGH hopes for 1918, written by Horton Foote, the scenarist of, among other films, the wonderful Tender Mercies. This movie, however, is a well-intentioned but unmitigated bore, as only something based on a group of plays about one's own nice, dull family by a nice, sentimentalizing playwright can be. And here there was no Bruce Beresford to direct, only a certain Ken Harrison; moreover, in Tender Mercies Foote had to create his characters and story; here he had a ready-made one that neither Marcel Duchamp nor even the cat would have dragged in--only a tenderhearted, nostalgically reminiscing scion.

We are in the small Texas town of Harrison, where the local yokels drill clownishly in front of the town hall on the unlikely chance of fighting in France, where their betters are already beginning to fall. Horace (William Converse-Roberts) has a tailoring and dry-cleaning establishment, but because of his wife, Lizzie (Hallie Foote, the author's daughter), and their baby girl, he won't enlist, his rich, gung-ho father-in-law's urgings to the contrary. Lizzie's younger brother, Brother (sic), is, on the contrary, spoiling to go off to war. A college dropout at 17, he spends most of his time at the nickelodeon devouring jingoistic war films when not incurring gambling debts or impregnating the odd girl. He is also a great purveyor of war news and local gossip, which, in these days of the Spanish-flu epidemic, comes down to who has just sickened or died.

1918 is one part gently bittersweet family conflicts; one part war hysteria as seen through the distancing and miniaturizing end of the telescope; one part involuntary parody, as messengers keep coming to announce the death of yet another person we neither know nor care about; and several parts sweet affirmation of life. For Lizzie, who lost her baby to the flu when both Horace and she came down with it, is happily pregnant again, and both the war and the epidemic are over, and so, best news of all, is the film, after 91 interminable-seeming minutes. For 1918 is, first of all, evasive, showing little or nothing of the horrors of actual illness, but without finding a stirringly poetic equivalent for it, as Katherine Anne Porter did in her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Second, it is uncinematic, in that even the rare outdoor sequences have a static, stagy look about them, as if they had been shot in a penurious studio, although, in fact, the film was made in Waxahachie, where most of the recent movies about lonesomeness in the Lone Star were shot, and which threatens to become a Disneyland for nostalgic filmmakers.

Third, and fatal, there is nothing new about this film--not a single revelation that makes these people worth recording at length, no epiphany of any sort. It may still be possible to get away with a slice of life, but you have to be extremely careful where you slice it: There is precious little ordinary life--whether of the 1985 or the 1918 variety--that hasn't already been sliced to the bone. The acting in 1918 doesn't add much either. Hallie Foote is too bovinely placid to convey inner turmoil; Converse-Roberts, conversely, looks and acts, somehow, too thin, too boyish to suggest a husband to this hefty woman. As Brother, Matthew Broderick is, as usual, full of spunk, but also, alas, full of himself. The best work in the film comes from Rochelle Oliver as Lizzie's mother--hers is the only performance that gives off more than the writing and directing provide.