NATIONAL REVIEW: MOVIE REVIEWS BY JOHN SIMON

The overrated Mike Figgis's The Loss of Sexual Innocence strikes me as the mating of pretension and ineptitude, both of them the writer-director's stock in trade. This opus, 15 years in gestation, equates the story of Figgis's coming of age with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

As if this weren't enough, Figgis rewrites the Bible. A hefty African Adam (Femi Ogumbanjo) and a scrawny Scandinavian blonde Eve (Hanne Klintoe) surface separately from a pond. He seems mostly cheerful, she a rather anemic Anadyomene. After chasing around the underbrush nude, they finally acquire one piece of clothing: a snake worn around the neck as a (get it?) boa. "The finale," Figgis explains, "called for them to emerge from the Garden of Eden in a violent rainstorm, naked, and then to be surrounded by paparazzi and street people." You'd think creatures born from the waves could handle a mere rainstorm, especially without having to worry about their clothes getting drenched.

The film is proudly, defiantly nonlinear. The story of Genesis is intercut with supposedly crucial incidents from the life of the filmmaker at ages 5, 12, 16, and, we read, "as a fully grown man," though there is scant evidence of Figgis's having attained that state. Various mundane episodes are told in fragmented fashion and no particular order in places without context, as when an unidentified person waits for an anonymous other in a meaningless airport.

The adult Nic (our hero) is portrayed by a stony-faced Julian Sands, seen driving with a couple of others, one of them presumably his wife, along a highway through the Sahara. Nothing happens until the car is stopped by a seemingly dead body before it, whereupon the emerging passengers are surrounded by a bunch of hostile Bedouins, threatening the loss of more than sexual innocence. Because Figgis was born in Carlisle, England, then lived in Nairobi and Newcastle, these locations are thrown pell-mell into the film. Having played with various rock and R&B bands, Figgis fancies himself a composer as well, and supplies his own soundtrack, fully on a par with all else in the film.

His fame rests chiefly on his one hit, Leaving Las Vegas, which I found as trashy as the rest of his śuvre. The interest of his failed last feature, One Night Stand, lay chiefly in its interracial romance, though at least Wesley Snipes and Nastassja Kinski did not portray Adam and Eve. The name of Figgis's current production company is Red Mullet Films; I wonder how a herring managed to become a mullet.

A better film from a better director -- though still, alas, unsatisfactory -- is Limbo, by John Sayles. The author-director, who is also a novelist, offers something that craves to be a good-sized novel and emerges jumpy on film, with some key characters rather too sketchy, although the striking Alaskan surroundings, authoritatively shot by the veteran cinematographer Haskell Wexler, offer a good deal in compensation.

Best about the movie is its casting of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and David Strathairn in the leads; next-best are the sequences of them, and the heroine's younger sister (the not especially winning Vanessa Martinez), struggling to survive as castaways in the wilderness. But there is also an undernourished crime story and a story of long-dead characters read from a found diary, less appealing than the fishing and cannery episodes, displaying Sayles as an accomplished quasi-documentarian.

Irritatingly, Miss Martinez's readings from that diary lead up to a trick climax that diminishes their value, and the entire film concludes with some shaggy-dog gimmickry unworthy of its finer aspects. Even so, the faults of Limbo are those of a good mind trying to be too clever, rather than, as customary in Hollywood, of poor minds wallowing in their incompetence. And, with some good writing, acting, and photography, the body of the film, at any rate, passes muster.

Shaw considered An Ideal Husband Wilde's best play, only because, I suspect, he knew that its clear superior, The Importance of Being Earnest, was competition too close for comfort. But even Wilde's splendid second-best should be spared the ignominy that Oliver Parker's adaptation and direction heap upon it. Wilde used the typically Victorian melodramatic plot as a mere excuse for his irresistibly challenging epigrams. Parker, inexcusably, emphasizes the creaky plot, cuts out much of the wit, and introduces his own failed cleverness instead. The cuckoo hatched from this egg is stillborn.

Early on in the play, for example, the unscrupulous Mrs. Cheveley says this about politicians: "In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin." That, with its allusion to Shakespeare's famous line, is nothing short of profound; like so much of value, it is excised from the film. I shan't bother you with samples of Parker's sorry surrogate wit, but to convey how low the director will stoop, let me mention that he introduces a would-be steamy bedroom scene that, on top of its total inappropriateness, is played with un- paralleled lack of brio.

Aside from wit, what distinguishes Wilde's plays is their intense theatricality, the precise virtue most unsuited to film. This hasn't stopped moviemakers from trying. Thus the great Ernst Lubitsch made a silent-movie version of Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), though Wilde without words is like a chocolate soda without chocolate. In 1949, Otto Preminger weighed in with The Fan, about which it suffices to say that two of the leads were played by Jeanne Crain and Richard Greene.

Here at least we have a British cast, with the exception of Julianne Moore, playing the Machiavellian Mrs. Cheveley -- who tries to blackmail the brilliant, rising politician -- hero by exposing the youthful sin that started his success -- with a one-note, smarmy sugariness far less tolerable than her character's deficient ethics. Jeremy Northam may well be the current English leading man of choice, but as Sir Robert Chiltern, threatened with the loss of both his career and his beloved but unbending wife, he exhibits more plodding determination than imperiled dash. As Lady Chiltern, on whose marmoreal morals and stipulated "grave Greek beauty" so much depends, the not untalented but amiably ordinary Cate Blanchett is no goddess confronted with the odor of humanity. And as the typically saucy Wildean ingenue, Mabel, the insufferably smug and woodchuck-cheeked Minnie Driver proffers what the French call a tête à gifler -- a face begging to be slapped.

Relatively (I stress the adverb) more successful are Rupert Everett as Lord Goring, the effete wastrel with the heart of gold, and John Wood, as his disgruntled and blustering father, the Earl of Caversham. The former lacks a bit of extra charm, the latter some added weight. But what can you expect from a film that allows Peter Vaughan, a specialist in butlers, to overact shamelessly, and squanders the delightful Lindsay Duncan on the tiny part of Lady Markby, further diminished by Parker's cuts? Even David Johnson's cinematography is humdrum, and the routine but relentless music by the aptly named Charlie Mole seems to reach us annoyingly from a burrow.

My favorite bit is when the principals attend the premiere of the then not-yet-produced Importance of Being Earnest, a literary device known as prolepsis, here as apt as when Mabel at one point refers to Mrs. Cheveley as Mrs. Cheeseley.