To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday.

Annoying as it was as a play (by Michael Brady), To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday is even more so as a movie, adapted by the television writer David E. Kelley. This is the story of David Lewis, who loses his adored wife, Gillian, in a boating accident off Nantucket on her 35th birthday. Mad with grief, he lives with his teenage daughter, Rachel, in his beach house, and refuses to resume his teaching job in Boston. Rachel feels, and is, neglected enough for Esther, Gillian's sister, to threaten legal action to adopt her, even though Esther's husband, Paul, is against such extreme measures. But David lives only for his dead wife, who keeps appearing to him for lengthy, loving talks on the nocturnal beach and elsewhere, and even for some chaste lovemaking, a sort of platonic necrophilia.

A movie in which an eligible divorcee is named Kevin is bad enough, but one where a widower has sexy love scenes with his late wife is insupportable, even if she is played by a Michelle Pfeiffer as delightful as ever. The mixture of the stickily sentimental, the swooningly rancid, and the just plain nauseating is unbeatably unbearable. I have no problem with a bereaved man's never remarrying, only with endless t - te-a-t - tes in which the deceased converses and flirts exactly as if still alive. A man could do two things: recall actual conversations with his Gillian and fantasize what they might do together if she were still around. For him to see and hear things in such cloyingly fulsome detail requires either the services of a trashy screenwriter or a totally deranged mind. Either the writer should be more committed, or the protagonist should be committed.

David is played by Peter Gallagher, who has the bushiest eyebrows and most bloated lips of any leading man, living or dead. Add to this a Beatle haircut, and you have a cross between a melting faun and an anthropomorphic sheepdog. As Rachel, Claire Danes, Hollywood's currently favorite portrayer of teenagers, is adequate but, as usual, unprepossessing. It is a measure of the film's ineptitude that Kathy Baker, one of our finest actresses, can't do anything much for Esther. Wendy Crawson is as good as one can be playing a woman called Kevin; Bruce Altman may be too crude as Paul, but it hardly matters. The central scenes, under Michael Pressman's gooey direction, are unsurpassably sticky. Perhaps one could put the extant prints of the film to better use by cutting them up and marketing them as flypaper.