The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 52

THE BOSTON GLOBE FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 1994 For the record IB Correction: Because of a reporting jerror, yesterday's Calendar printed Jhe wrong date for a James Brown Z'Z'ntiTiruir Tf'n lTnA 4 XT 1 xi.3 ai xiaruur- Fan Pier, Northern Avenue. 52 4i ii i '1 kri it tm I 1 1 Am TV? a 4s. 'i I -V Costner's "Wyatt Earp." Costner (second from left) as family strong, silent Wyatt Earp gives film its fire NOW InickhTdeohI wesxwton rLAlllNll 1 424-1 500 I 6-6060 GENERAL CINEMA GENERAL CINEMA 1 LOEWS PEABODY FRAMINGHAM HARVARD SQ. atmntt uuffwt CBTR hi (jiswowii urotit) iochuCsi CAMitioot 599-1310 Hi lOlO I7I-44W 864-4580 die Boston 466-1818 for Home Delivery. man Wyatt Earp, posing with his WYATT EARP Directed by: Lawrence asdan Screenplay by: Dan Gordon, Kasdan Starring: Kevin Costner, Dennis Qmid, Gene Hackman, Jeff Fahey, Mark Harmon, Michael Madsen, Catherine O'Hara, Mare Winningham, Bill PuMman, Joanna Going, Isabella RosseUini Tom Sizemore, JoBeth Williams, Annabeth Gish Playing at: Nickelodeon, suburbs Rated: PG-13 (strong gmfights, some language and sensuality) el, a richness of detail rare in contemporary studio films.

One measure of his quiet confidence is that he has given the film's showy role, that of the flamboyant, dissolute, loyal, gunslinging Georgia dentist, Doc Holliday, to Dennis Quaid, who's brilliant in it. Quaid lost 43 pounds so he'd look appropriately emaciated and tubercular and also appear convincingly reckless, a man with nothing to lose. Quaid's John Carradine gaunt-ness and edgy, sardonic wit provide colorful counterpoint to Costner's more distanced, inner-directed Earp, who steadily demythicizes the Old West by convincing us that the messy facts of the Wyatt Earp saga were even more fascinating than the invented legend. Joanna Going contributes a breakthrough performance as the spirited actress to whom Earp remained married for 47 years; Michael Madsen provides older-brother steadiness as Virgil Earp; and David Andrews' James startled he is to find himself so strongly attracted to the actress onstage who became his third wife. That's how far inside himself he has retreated.

Costner has done his homework, but while "Wyatt Earp" pushes off from research and fact, it's also very much a big, dark, solid movie with lots of room for brooding, lots of silences, lots of time to let internal forces gather. One of the reasons Costner is convincing as an American hero is that he believes in the frontier values Earp personified. He also believes in movies, and he has internalized both. That's why his performance doesn't have to be showy. It rests on a base of conviction.

It has also been insufficiently noted that Costner is an actor in love with words. He believes in the potency of language. He can take a simple line like the one following his disarming a man in a saloon fight "He was goin' to kill me over nuthin'" -and make it resonate. Although insensitive to the needs of his brothers' wives, he's surprisingly delicate in the subtle piece of advice he gives his successor in Dodge City, Bat Masterson's brother. "You're too affable," he says, and he's right.

Ed Masterson is shot shortly after Wyatt rounds up his brothers and pushes on to the Arizona silver mining boomtown of Tombstone, where he went to make money, not war at the OK Corral. Costner's Earp doesn't talk much, but his character and the film have the amplitude of a 19th-century nov- 'Lion King" is an instant classic Heading off to the OK corral in Kevin Costner's EARP Continued from Page 47 family, keeping his brothers together. And he did to the dismay of their wives, whose second-class status the film truthfully puts on the table, unglossed by sentimentality or political correctness. What we mostly get from Costner's Wyatt Earp, though, is the man's isolation. It looms just as large as his obvious strength of character.

Earp lived a long time, and preferred not to talk of his six years of law enforcement, of the mythologized gunfight at the OK Corral, of the bloody ride of vengeance he took through Arizona fol 10EWS COPLEY PLACE 1 00 HUNTINGTON AVE. BOSTON 2661300 GENERAL CINEMA CHESTNUT HILL RT. 9 AT HAMMOND ST. 277-2500 'SHOWCASE CINEMAS' WOBURN CINEMAS' SHOWCASE CINEMAS' REVERE RT.Clt SQUIRE RD. 286 1660 RT.128EXIT3SAIT.38 9335330 of a be wife, his brothers and their wives.

Earp reminds us how the lines were blurred in a society that lived in saloons, saw gambling as a gentleman's profession and matter-of-fact-ly accepted marriage to whores because they often were the only women around. There's nothing rollicking about the Old West we get here. It's a hard place especially on women -and the icy Earp never romanticizes his rent-a-cop job. Occasionally the film grows discursive, loses urgency, trips over its own earnestness. It never reaches the piercing visual poetry of the greatest of the Wyatt Earp films, "My Darling Clementine." But it outdistances all the others, and that's saying something.

Director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan knows how to keep humanism at the center of a film, and it's kept at the center of this one. It's also so politically incorrect that it's almost endearing. Women will not cheer when Earp says, 'You know I don't like counting on women." But it also has the wit to knock any hint of family-values platitudes out of the ballpark. Any film willing to bet on the view that what happens in the spaces between the shootouts is what's interesting, as this one does, gets my vote, and then some. "Wyatt Earp" is a classic Western, powerfully embodying on several levels the theme of loss.

And it's sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge that for all its efforts in the direction of male bonding, its only enduring bond, ironically, is with a woman. (Sill iHiil hog, a meerkat and hyenas. elements of ominousness in "The Lion King." A rule of thumb might be that a child who can handle "Bambi" can probably handle "The Lion King" with advance prepping. Certainly the animators have done themselves proud here. The; drawing is spectacular, except for some ill-advised attempts to fuzzy up some backgrounds in a misconceived attempt to supply perspective not necessary since these animations are patently two-dimensional.

Nor does the Disney house style yet allow for an equivalent to the wildness and spontaneity of the classic Warner cartoons. Disney animations still must fight a tendency to seem manufactured, fabricated. But the grandeur of scale and virtuosity of the drawings ensure enough visual ex-' citement to carry "The Lion King" past a few stretches where the inspiration wears thin. Make no mistake, the magnitude of the achievement here which includes a heads-up decision to make the environment look authentically African and not backlot Hollywood, right down to the color choices far outweighs any shortcomings. "The Lion King" is both populist blockbuster and royal trcjft.

lULiu Ly i a '''fh' ri SN lowing the ambush of his brother, Morgan, as part of that famous gun-fight's aftermath. In Costner's eyes we see an awareness of impending obsolescence. Long before Earp was transformed into a myth to his amazement and dismay, he knew he was being replaced by a new order lawman in a more civilized West he helped make possible. One of the brothers' wives in the film calls Earp cold man, but that's not quite right. He's also an implacable man wrapped in a sense of duty.

He may the boss of his family, but we see just how alone he is in a crowded theater when his face tells us how TWeiMTtETH CENTURY FOK GENERAL CINEMA 10EWS FRESH POND FRESH POND MALL 6612900 BRAINTREE 10 OFf fOHIS 37 1 1 38 848 1070 LOEWS NATICX LOEWS S0MERVILLE IT. 9 0PP. SHOPPEU W0ILD ATASSEM1LYSQ.RT.93 653-5005 237-5840 628-7000 Simba's companions Include a wart MOVIE Continued from Page 47 to the young lion's Prince Hal as he avoids responsibility until called to duty. A goofy trio of lowlife hyenas -voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin and Jim Cummings (he's the one who's so dumb he doesn't realize he's chewing on his own leg) also help uphold the liveliness level against the stately lions. They also provide the film's most chilling reference, when their mindless but intense goose-stepping in a cave re-, calls the Hitler-worship in "Triumph of the Will." And Jeremy Irons is at his suave Claus Von Bulow best, purringly blending malevolence and boredom in the role of the evil usurper, Simba's uncle Scar.

Unlike "Bambi," however, "The Lion JSngTs red in tooth and claw, never quite letting us forget that we're dealing with meat eaters. There's real splendor in the initial gathering of the animals to salute the new cub's birth. It's one of the great Disney scenes. But there's no hiding the fact that the lions are predators, that their rule is based on fear, and that a lot of the animals are there not because they're feeling festive but in the hope that they'll be eaten later rather than sooner. The Pride Lands, as they're called, are not exactly one big happy ecosystem, and the film's most unintentionally funny inclusion may be the blatantly phallic rock upon which the lions gaze out over their kingdom.

The uneven balance of power isn't quite rationalized when James Earl Jones' nobly sonorous papa lion, Mustafa, tells the cub that the lions eat the antelopes and the antelopes eat the lions after the lions die and their bodies turn to grass. There's none of the sugarcoating of past Disney animal animations in FR0f1 HE CROAf AL0nGf 77 I A-J Ptl PGlPABmTAGlll8NCE5D6Ct5TEDgS muohJs ten wiaitt wn wr wii fcnuia THE LION KING Directed by: Roger Allen, Rob Minkoff Screenplay by: Irene Meceki, Jonathan Roberts, Linda Wollverton With the voices of: James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Matthew Broderick, Moira Kelly, Niketa, Calame, Ernie Sabella, Nathan Lane, Robert GuiUaume, Rowan Atkinson, Madge Sinclair, Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, Jim Cummings Playing at: Copley Place, suburbs Rated: "The Lion King," though the prevailing pitilessness of the system is further softened by the fact that the male cub loses fights to a little lioness who grows up to become his mate. Still, that initial assembly of the animals far outdistances in its majesty the sentimental gathering of the forest creatures in "Bambi." Terrific overhead perspectives add to the new film's visual excitement, flavor is increased by a bird and a baboon, and a scene when small animals scurry to avoid being crushed by elephants suggests the clomping of those robotic pile-driving behemoths in "Star Wars." rating notwithstanding, there definitely are I' SNEAK PREVIEW TOMORROW! SHOWCASE GENERAL CINEMA GENERAL CINEMA DEDHAM IT. 1(128 EXIT ISA 326495! ISWSTONIQ ITE 128 EXIT 321 2299200 PEABODY K0ITHSH0USHK.CTI. 5991310.