Holiday Hustle - new films for 1999 Christmas season

GIVEN the preternatural plethora of holiday movies and their inordinate length, the best I can offer is a kind of checklist of those I've been able to see for your Yuletide guidance. To start with the cream: The Hurricane is the story of the black New Jersey boxing champion Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who spent almost 20 years in jail for murders he did not commit. But for the self-sacrificing efforts of a black youth from Brooklyn and three white Canadians, he might have rotted there till his death. This true story is told with magnificent restraint in what may be Norman Jewison's finest directorial effort, with Denzel Washington superbly controlled in the lead and backed up by a fine supporting cast. The intelligent screenplay stays resolutely unhistrionic, and is all the more moving for it.

No less fine is Angela's Ashes, from Frank McCourt's bestselling memoir of his dreadfully deprived Irish childhood. The book profited from its lack of self-pity and strong sense of humor; much of this survives in the screenplay by Laura Jones and the director, Alan Parker. Parker's films have been wildly uneven, but here he sustains remarkable judiciousness throughout. Shooting on location in Dublin and Limerick, Michael Seresin captures the misery, grotesquery, and heroism of poverty with equal sharpness. The acting of both children and adults is nothing short of sublime, with Joe Breen particularly haunting as young Frank, and Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson shattering as his parents.

Readers of John Irving's Cider House Rules may find the author's screen adaptation procrustean and bowdlerizing. But taken just as a movie, it charms and entertains, and still has a little edge left. Lasse Hallstrom, the Swedish director of the delightful My Life as a Dog, has floundered in Hollywood, but here recovers his footing with his favorite subject, children, specifically orphans, perfectly cast and directed. Michael Caine is first-rate as the humane but fallible doctor running the orphanage, and Tobey Maguire is immensely winning as the brainy orphan who becomes his assistant. The marvelous supporting cast includes Kathy Baker, Jane Alexander, and Delroy Lindo; Oliver Stapleton's camera captures the colors of New England to burnished perfection.

In directing Cradle Will Rock, Tim Robbins deftly juggles the turmoil and fervor of the Depression-ravaged '30s in several public and private stories, historical and fictional. There are accounts of Marc Blitzstein's leftist opera, The Cradle Will Rock, which the authorities couldn't squelch, and of Diego Rivera's politicized Rockefeller Center murals, which were destroyed. Cherry Jones is wonderful as Hallie Flanagan, the embattled head of the Federal Theater, but Bill Murray, John Turturro, Ruben Blades, and Vanessa Redgrave are no slouches either in various historical or invented roles, and Emily Watson again breaks your heart. Only Joan Cusack and, as Orson Welles, Angus Macfadyen are disasters; otherwise, despite some oversimplifications, the film works.

The most effective movie adaptation of Jane Austen so far is Patricia Rozema's delicious Mansfield Park. Nothing in Rozema's past foretold this winner, which takes considerable liberties with the novel and gets away with it. The heroine, Fanny, is made into an obvious Austen clone by having some Austen letters and diaries grafted onto her; strong anti-colonialism is interpolated; and there is diverse sexuality added or emphasized. But Rozema's script and direction are amusingly idiosyncratic and shapely, with crosscutting used more inventively and powerfully than usual. We get exhilarating cinematography by Michael Coulter, tasteful music by Lesley Barber, and flawless ensemble acting from a large cast featuring such beauties as Frances O'Connor and Embeth Davidtz, a splendid double role for the gifted Lindsay Duncan, and an astonishing performance by Harold Pinter in an atypical upper- class part.

Now for lesser achievements. Frank Darabont of The Shawshank Redemption tackles another Stephen King prison novel, The Green Mile. This tale of several diverse prison guards and several no less diverse death-row inmates is intelligent trash. King cannot resist the supernatural-in this case the healing powers of a black giant wrongfully condemned to death (but many gray miles from The Hurricane)-yet even the realistic parts wallow in flamboyance that, at three hours, is a bit excessive. Tom Hanks heads a solid cast in which David Morse and Michael Clarke Duncan (as the giant) especially distinguish themselves. Thomas Newman's music is emblematic of the movie: sometimes clever, sometimes trite. The title derives from the green-painted floors leading to the electric chair; one botched-execution scene is almost unbearably harrowing.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, written and directed by Anthony Minghella, is a remake of Rene Clement's Purple Noon, based on Patricia Highsmith's admired mystery novel. In it, a nice but poor boy is sent to Italy by a millionaire father to retrieve his playboy son. But the virtuous youth, taken up by the jazz-loving and bisexually promiscuous ne'er-do-well and his would-be-writer girlfriend, develops a taste for the luxurious dolce far niente in a gorgeous seaside resort. Seduced by his newfound amenities, our hero cannot endure being just as suddenly dropped by the easily bored playboy, and, provoked by insults, kills him. He assumes his victim's identity and is gradually goaded into additional murders, and, though not without torment, gets away with them.