Cinema: Charlie Bubbles

Charlie Bubbles After his bravura performance in Joe Egg (TIME, Feb. 9), there can be no doubt that Albert Finney can act. After Charlie Bubbles, there will be none that he can direct. The question is whether he should, if this sort of movie is what he feels is worth doing.

In his directorial debut, Finney, who also plays the title role, has taken on a stupefyingly familiar theme: the writer who has sold out to Mammon. Wretched in his wealth, Charlie stumbles through life drunk, debauched and dull, until he decides to go home again to revisit his ex-wife and child in the North Country, where he was born. With him is a migratory bird (Liza Minnelli) who has journeyed from America to be his secretary. Their trip rapidly becomes a descent into the hell of present-day materialistic England. Superhighways stretch on into meaningless dark. High-rise buildings hover like demons over the landscape. Friends talk past him, never to him.

Once home, Charlie finds his wife itchy and bitchy, his little boy unteachable and unreachable. Miserably, he wanders into a mythically peaceful and green meadow near by. There, a huge red-and-yellow ascension balloon sits waiting, like the swan boat in Lohengrin. He clambers aboard and cuts the ropes, borne free to oblivion.

Director Finney sets the correct tone for his fable of reality once removed. But charging the atmosphere with a Pinteresque amalgam of the incongruous and the comic is not enough. The film rests on a script by Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey) that settles for cringingly arch character names (Smokey Pickles, Mr. Noseworthy) and a naive blend of symbolism and social critiscism. What is worse, Charlie’s contempt for the traps and trappings of wealth cannot hide an underlying self-pity, accentuated by Actor Finney’s eyes-closed, O-God-I’m-so-weary-of-you-all posture. And Charlie’s wild-blue-yonder exitis not so much escape as escapism—providing an end without a conclusion to a view without a point.