Billy Bathgate

Starring: Dustin Hoffman

Directed by: Robert Benton

RS: Not Rated

1991 Drama

Disney's film version of E.L. Doctorow's celebrated 1989 gangster novel has been plagued by reported clashes between star Dustin Hoffman and director Robert Benton, as well as delays and reshooting that escalated the budget to $50 million. You expect "Billy's Gate" and instead get a lavishly mounted and provocative entertainment that is also as disconcertingly flat as those lofty PBS adaptations that faithfully capture the surface of a novel while missing its essence.

Doctorow made Billy, a sixteen-year-old, Depressionera Bronx kid with a yen for the rackets, into an urbanized Huck Finn. Billy wants more than an exit from the poverty of Bathgate Avenue; he wants a "mythological change of my station." The book is a single internal monologue, written in the heightened language of someone who has grown from boyhood in the gang of Dutch Schultz to manhood in the clutches of corporate America. Loren Dean ("Plain Clothes") gets Billy's charm and avidity down pat. But Benton and screenwriter Tom Stoppard ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead") deny him the perspective of age and poetic reach. On-screen, Billy is a cipher who mostly watches. With no strong anchor or point of view, the movie drifts from episode to episode in ways that are often compelling but ultimately pointless.

Billy's juggling ability wins him favor with the notorious Dutch Schultz (Hoffman), who takes him on as a gofer and spy. Dutch's accountant, Otto Berman (a superb Steven Hill), instructs Billy in numbers and capitalism. But Dutch -- who enjoys bashing a man's head to a bloody pulp for no reason -- leaves the lasting impression. Billy assists Dutch in the tugboat execution of dandyish hit man Bo Weinberg (Bruce Willis in a sharp cameo) and in caring for Dutch's girl, Drew Preston (Nicole Kidman), a married society beauty with a risky lech for hoods. Kidman gives Drew's seduction of Billy a potent erotic charge (there's even a glimpse of pubic hair -- a Disney first), but you can feel her struggling with a role that's more concept than substance.

Hoffman, though, is a roaring, hypnotic wonder. He makes Dutch's agile wit as riveting as his lethal rage. His Dutch is the only character who fully inhabits this elaborate production. Even gifted cameraman Nestor Almendros can't approximate on film what the book describes as "the realm of high audacity these men moved in, like another dimension." Lacking Doctorow's pungent prose to lift us to that rarefied realm, Benton's film stays resolutely earthbound.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 618