Death Becomes Her

Starring: Goldie Hawn

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis

RS: Not Rated

1992 Comedy

This $40 million Gothic wind-up toy is so tightly coiled by director Robert Zemeckis (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) that it breaks its springs way before the final credits. But in high spin, Death Becomes Her is madly inventive fun. Meryl Streep delivers a broad, bitchy, outrageously comic performance as Madeline Ashton, an aging actress reduced to clodhopping through a Broadway-musical version of Sweet Bird of Youth. When her mousy friend Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) introduces her fiancT, plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis), Madeline pounces. Menville is no catch -- Willis plays him as a tweedy nerd. But he can nip and tuck a few years off Madeline and restore her film career. Madeline marries him and leaves Helen to lick her wounds.

Seven years later, Helen -- now a three-hundred-pound blimp -- is holed up in her apartment watching a video in which Madeline's character is strangled. There are few funnier sights around than Hawn in a fat suit gorging on gooey frosting. Fast-forward another seven years: The newly svelte Helen confronts the saggy Madeline. Helen has drunk at the Fountain of Youth provided by Lisle von Rhumans, a sexy witch played by Isabella Rossellini. Madeline eventually gulps the potion, too, and the scenes in which the aging process is reversed are perversely hypnotic until Zemeckis wears out the gimmick with repetition and vulgar sight gags.

Streep and Hawn play this one-note nonsense with powerhouse enthusiasm, dropping any pretense to vanity. They sport wrinkles, crow's-feet and liver spots that are as unflattering as they are convincing. And when the gift of eternal life renders them invincible, they twist their bodies into shapes that defy belief and define a high-water mark of Hollywood technical know-how. The makeup, by Dick Smith, and visual effects, supervised by Ken Ralston, deserve an Oscar.

Writers Martin Donovan and David Koepp, who teamed on the psychosexual thriller Apartment Zero, are out to skewer our obsession with youth and beauty. It's a shame that the movie, which works as an entertaining contraption, never grapples with the darker questions it raises.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 637