02/28/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Marvin's Room
Humor prevails in a tough 'Room'

**** (out of five)
Starring Meryl Streep, Leonard DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Hume Cronyn, Gwen Verdon, Hal Scardino, Dan Hedaya. A Miramax Films release written by Scott McPhersons, directed by Jerry Zaks. At the Jane Pickens, North Dartmouth Mall, Showcase North Attleboro and Showcase Warwick cinemas. Rated PG-13, contains adult themes, profanity. Running time: 98 minutes.

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

Death, aging, nursing homes and leukemia are some of the prime ingredients in Marvin's Room.

It's also pretty darned funny.

Despite the downbeat mix, Marvin's Room is really about love and caring and coming to terms with our fears. Yes, it's one of those cuddly families-coming-together-and-overcoming-emotional-barriers movies. But the late Scott McPherson's screenplay, based on his 1991 hit play, tosses a few curves and doesn't always come out where one thinks it will.

Perhaps some of the ingredients in the mix are what have given Marvin's Room such a slow national release, despite Diane Keaton's Oscar nomination. In its seventh week, it was only playing in 33 theaters nationwide, including only 1 in the Boston area.

Now it's blossoming to more theaters, and if you want to laugh and cry and come face to face with some of your nightmares -- and not the fake jolts of something like Scream -- then Marvin's Room is a place to start.

Keaton plays Bessie, a middle-aged woman who has given up an outside life to provide around-the-clock care to her bed-ridden father, Marvin (Hume Cronyn), and her dithering aunt, Ruth (Gwen Verdon), whose favorite TV soap opera has become her reality.

But Bessie has grown more tired than she would like to admit from her hectic schedule. When a doctor checks her and diagnoses leukemia, she calls out to the sister she hasn't seen in 20 years, to see if either she or one of her two sons could be a match for a bone-marrow transplant.

Lee (Meryl Streep), who is about to get her cosmetology license in Ohio, rushes to Florida to help out. But Lee has her own problems. She's a single mother whose older son, Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio), has never forgiven her for putting his father out of their lives. Conversely, she finds it hard to forgive Hank for burning down their house. In fact, she must pull him out of reform school for the trip from Ohio to Florida.

As you probably have guessed, Marvin's Room brings these two estranged sisters together in a household that becomes a pressure cooker of emotions where they'll bicker and snipe at each other and tear open old wounds. The surprise is how light and amusing most of Marvin's Room is, and how joyous it becomes without taking us to a completely predictable conclusion.

Full of surprises
It's full of offbeat little surprises, like the warm-hearted performance of Robert De Niro as the affable Dr. Wally who, when looking for a piece of surgical equipment, asks his unnerved patient, "Now where did I put the whatchamacallit?" Or Dr. Wally's dazed new receptionist (Dan Hedaya), who asks too many touchy questions. Or Aunt Ruth's electric heart monitor, which always sets off the garage door opener.

These things, coupled with the way Bessie is filled with endless good cheer and love toward her father and aunt, no matter how exasperating they can be and no matter how tired she is, are what gives Marvin's Room its human touch. They get to Lee, who otherwise seems overwhelmed by life and forever trapped by circumstances.

Lee feels that her life is finally pulling together, and now she is being sucked back into family ties she fled many years ago. She wants to flee again.

Streep gives Lee the anxiety and desperation of a woman who doesn't know how to unlock the love she has inside. She demands obedience from her son without explanations and without giving him any feedback. A major argument can flare up over something as simple as a potato chip.

It's a test of wills between her and Hank, played heartbreakingly by DiCaprio as a boy searching for the love he has never had in his life. She's the force who must blink if the film is to move forward. It's not always certain that she will.

Reaching out for each other
Keaton gives one of her finest performances as Bessie, who reaches out understandingly to Hank, although she occasionally manages to say just the wrong thing. One of the film's brightest moments comes when Hank surprises her with a wild ride through the surf along a beach and finally makes a connection to another human being.

Although Bessie says that her stroke-victim father has been dying "about 20 years . . . doing it real slow, so I don't miss anything," she isn't bitter. She greets even the smallest moments with joy and has seemed to find the meaning of life.

McPherson, who died of AIDS, based the premise of Marvin's Room on his own experiences as a young man witnessing his own Aunt Bessie caring for his grandfather and ailing aunt. He incorporated those themes of caring and love and selfless devotion with his own experiences with AIDS.

It makes for a film that's powerful and memorable because so much of it comes from the heart.