The Best Intentions.

To say that the first half of The Best Intentions is boring and the second mesmerizing would be to overstate the case, but not grossly. By now, most readers will know that this Ingmar Bergman story is about the courtship and early married life of his parents, a Lutheran minister reared in and embittered by poverty, and an upper-class girl, cosseted by wealth, but serious enough to study for the nursing profession and passionate enough to cleave to a suitor whom her cherished parents deplore. The entire movie benefits from many wonderful strokes of writing, direction (by Bille August), and, particularly, acting (Pemilla August and Samuel Froeller heading a sterling cast); but in the courtship half of the film there is also a feeling of laboriousness. Each dramatic development in it--the parental rejection of Henrik and various maneuvers to smother Anna's love for him, the seminarian's pusillanimity in regard to the disposal of his mistress, Anna's sense of betrayal when she learns of the other woman, the mistress's self-sacrifice, the off-again, on-again engagement and eventual marriage--seems to be arriving on schedule instead of simply unfolding. Nothing rings false yet little cuts deeply. We are lulled by the familiar instead of being startled into a new perception of it.

Bille August was handpicked by Bergman to mount his script and he has done a scrupulous job. In regard to the movie's first half, too scrupulous. Between what James Agee termed the "active" camera, "which takes its moment of the story by the scruff of the neck and |tells' it," and the "passive" camera, "whose business is transparency, to receive a moment of action and purely record it," August all too unwaveringly opts for the "passive" camera. On the other hand, his evenhanded direction immerses us, without ostentation, in the period (the 1910s), adjusting us to the tempo of that era's slower pace. The handling of actors is masterful and some of the scenes are carried by sheer theatrical skill: Max Von Sydow's ability to exude sad grandeur and thwarted kindness in his interview with his prospective son-in-law; the mother's bottled-up fury expressing itself as ethical punctiliousness; the swift sketching-in of Anna's uncles.

But, time and again, I was struck by how often predictable writing takes the sting out of masterful acting. When we can list the mother's objections seconds, nay, minutes before she does, and can pretty much dope out Henrik's reactions, too, before the talented Froeller gets a chance to perform them, we are put in the position of savoring acting as acting rather than as the conveyance of emotion. Bravura acting is always to be appreciated, particularly in consciously theatrical works like Children of Paradise, but The Best Intentions is no such work. its aim is to work on our emotions simply, directly, piercingly.

But it's hard for that emotional piercing to happen while we are being connoisseurs of great acting. But when, in the middle of the film, Anna and Henrik are married, The Best Intentions takes wing. And grows talons.

Henrik has accepted a post in the far north, ministering to factory workers and their families. The mating dance is over and, together under the same dilapidated roof, the couple begin to really reveal themselves in clashes and rapprochements that are as intense and scathing as anything in Bergman's master, Strindberg, or for that matter, in Bergman's own work. The Strindbergian method operates at full strength: the terrible festering silence of the male while the female shrilly harangues to the point where she starts hearing herself harangue; the dredging up of past offenses thought to be long forgotten even by the one who dredges them up; class resentments finding their focus on one's own marital partner; the incipience of physical violence; the alternation of bitter comedy with vitriolic fury.

The subplots of this second half contribute to the evocation of inner fires even when they seem to be the stuff of social rather than psychological drama. Henrik's conflict with a factory owner at first threatens to be conventional social protest, but Bergman gradually makes it clear that the businessman is no conventional heavy but a man whose torment mirrors Henrik's own. In these confrontations between man of God and man of power, Bergman's writing attains its cruel zenith and the acting is demonically brilliant.

The plight of an abused child whom Henrik shelters seems at first Dickensian in its pathos until the little boy, though acted with bruising individuality, is revealed to be the embodiment of the Barren North for Anna. Pernilla August's facial reactions to the boy's fall from Henrik's favor precisely chart Anna's psychological journey from tolerance through meanspirited rejection through cruel triumph to, finally, self-disgust and repentance.

In this second half, August's direction cuts to the bone as surely as does Bergman's writing. He uses spatial relationships to create tension, comedy, pathos. Henrik and the factory owner confront each other with the length of an entire church between them until Henrik's more fiery temper forces him down the center aisle, a move that is both an attack and a capitulation. A courtier, having advised Henrik and Anna upon the proper etiquette for an interview with the Queen about a royal appointment, performs a sort of dance without music as he stalks between Her Highness and the commoners. Particularly wonderful is the final image of Henrik and Anna, now embarking upon a second phase of their marriage after estrangement: he on a park bench, she on another a few feet away, they're separated by a space which they bridge by gazing into each other's eyes. It's an unforgettable picture of love keeping hopelessness at bay.

The big-screen version of The Best Intentions isn't a mere abridgment of the six-hour film that August and Bergman created for Swedish television. It is a separate work with several scenes differently written and shot. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that Bergman wrote (or at least planned) the longer script first, then mined it for the theatrical release. I'm willing to bet that the longer script has something that will make the courtship half of the story more exciting at three hours than its theatrical counterpart is at ninety minutes.

But what could that something be? We won't know until PBS or video format makes the six-hour movie available, but I will hazard that the TV version contains scenes that portray Henrik more vividly in its first half than the theatrical rendition does. If his relationships with his mistress, his teachers and fellow students, and his estranged relatives bring the tormented seminarian into sharp focus early in the film, then the later portrait of the tormented priest will be even more powerful than it already is. For, in this movie with its familiar Bergman theme of the prison house of personality, Henrik, whose sense of God's justice is so much greater than his sense of God's love, is the loneliest prisoner of them all.

Meanwhile, my appetite is whetted. As far as The Best Intentions is concerned, less is not more.