Cinema: Knockdown Duel

PUNCHLINE Directed and Written by David Seltzer

Lilah Krytsick (Sally Field) is discovered skulking into the kind of 24-hour diner that, in movies, betokens a Mafia presence. And sure enough, a disreputable little man is soon slipping her a mysterious packet. Dope? Money for laundering? No, jokes. As it turns out, terrible jokes. Jokes that produce a distillation of pure flop sweat when she tries them out at a comedy club called the Gas Station, where beginning comics mostly improvise their own humiliations. For Lilah is a bored New Jersey housewife who has been told all her life that she is a funny lady and dreams of public confirmation of that status. Steve Gold (Tom Hanks) is a sort of drug-free Lenny Bruce, brilliantly spritzing free-associational social comment and autobiography. If Lilah is trying to escape the traps of the lower-middle class, Steve is trying to avoid the respectability and stultification of the upper-middle class.

Will they meet? Will he try to be her mentor? Will she try to mother him? Need you ask? Will these two succumb to romantic entanglement? Well, no. Despite nicely managed temptation, they avoid it, and credit goes to David Seltzer for that intelligent choice. And for a movie that is full of terrific comic material and well-cast second bananas (John Goodman as Lilah’s befuddled husband, Max Alexander and Mac Robbins as ne’er-do-well comedians).

But Seltzer is not able to maintain a crucial balance: the one that his script intends between his two stars. Field is, as always, coolly expert, but with as much mystery about her as a bottle of Mop & Glo. Hanks, on the other hand, is our reigning master of desperate expediency. His amuck parody of Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain number goes into realms beyond performance.

But Field’s company co-produced the picture before Hanks was Big, and Oscar- winning stars do have certain hierarchical rights. In the final sequence, where Lilah and Steve must duel onstage over a TV contract, his routine is muted and cut to clear the way for her star turn. And she gets to make all the interesting moral choices. But that is just Hollywood housekeeping — neatening up after the picture has been stolen. R.S.