Robin Dougherty

When “The Avengers” was imported to the United States in 1966, Emma Peel and Diana Rigg became household names almost overnight. Britain’s ITV had hired the 28-year-old actress, an inginue with the Royal Shakespeare Company, on the strength of her work on another TV project, an Armchair Theatre production of a play called “The Hothouse.” Of her departure from the prestigious stage company, where she had turned heads with her portrayal of Cordelia in a celebrated Peter Brook production of “King Lear,” Rigg told the Independent: “It was a perverse decision in a long line of perverse decisions.” Nonetheless, with Emma Peel, Rigg walked into a role that uniquely captured the ’60s Zeitgeist, and gave her a chance to reach past the neurotic Ophelias and loopy Helenas of “Hamlet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Her Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts colleagues thought Rigg had gone slumming when she took on “The Avengers.” In reality, she brought a sleek, hip professionalism to a medium Shakespeare would have loved.

Indeed, the creators of the show, which ran on British television from 1961 to 1969, had updated the William Powell-Myrna Loy formula — itself a not-so-distant echo of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies — and, with a mod visual flair and ’60s Euro-jazz theme music, retooled it for the small screen. Set in swinging London, “The Avengers” cashed in on the popularity of the undercover-agent Cold War drama epitomized by the James Bond movies. And the show’s format anticipated latter-day TV detective teams that paired up a professional operator with a talented amateur (“Get Smart,” “Scarecrow and Mrs. King,” “Hart to Hart,” “Moonlighting”).

Rigg was a well-fitted foil for McNee’s Steed, whose old-world charm (he was something of a Regency dandy) superbly complemented Emma’s mod fashions and sporty ’60s lifestyle. Their characters coasted on style as much as their crime-fighting finesse, and Rigg’s Emma became an icon of cool. Unlike practically every other babe on big screens and little, Emma was her partner’s professional equal and not a toy.

Rigg had come on board the show in 1966, replacing Honor Blackman, who played Steed’s first female sidekick, Cathy Gale. Blackman left to take on the role of the quintessential Bond girl, Pussy Galore, in “Goldfinger.” Like her predecessor, Rigg soon went off to play another Bond lady friend, in her case Teresa, the Contessa di Vicenzo, in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Despite her short stay on “The Avengers,” Rigg’s arrival had signaled a startling new kind of TV heroine. Her trademark karate poses, stylized as they seem now, made her the rare woman who approached the world with a physicality that wasn’t entirely based on her sex appeal. She could fight back.

And she did. Viewers were glued to the set, watching Emma cavort in her black leather jumpsuits. Though they defined sartorial cool, these mainstays of Emma’s wardrobe were called fighting suits by the show’s designers. They had created them to give the show’s heroine something to run around in that wouldn’t tear. On the one hand, the cat suits were practical, just another part of Emma’s crime-fighting equipment. On the other, she looked great in them. “Sometimes I see photographs of myself,” Rigg recently told an interviewer, “and think, God I really was quite tasty. But I didn’t know it at the time.”

As rare as iconoclastic characters such as Emma Peel are today, they were nonexistent on TV in the ’60s. About the same time Emma was delivering the world from evil robots, Samantha’s husband, Darrin, on “Bewitched,” was forbidding her to employ her witchly powers, reducing her to vacuuming.

Not only had Rigg’s character broken all the rules that said good girls don’t hit their attackers, she also exercised a bold new sexual and social freedom, living alone and quite independently. (“It was a case of life imitating art,” Rigg once said. “I was like that myself to a degree.”) Indeed, what you don’t know about Emma is as interesting as what you do. Mrs. Peel is obviously a woman of means — she drives a Lotus. What’s never clear is why she wants to devote her time to fighting crime. Or where she learned to throw men twice her size. Viewers were encouraged to wonder about the limits of her relationship with Steed. Her availability is somewhat ambiguous, but by virtue of being married
(though her husband is always “away”), she’s sexually
experienced — an element not lost on the audience any more than it is
on Steed.

Emma Peel was indisputably a once-in-a-lifetime character. So where does an actress go once her days of chasing Eastern Bloc villains are over? When the robots and cybernauts and the people with sinister electronic devices who are trying to take over the world have been put in their place? Unlike many actresses who were sex symbols in their youth, Rigg survived professionally through middle age and beyond, despite never having a substantial career in Hollywood. What’s fascinating about Rigg is that she has been able to navigate a life in both high art and pop culture, no less at home as a Greek anti-heroine on the stage than she was flinging wisecracks as a Cold War operative in swinging London.

In the three decades since she played Emma Peel, Rigg, 61, has gone on to become a dame of the British Empire, a Tony winner (for “Medea” in 1994), an Emmy winner (for her role as Mrs. Danvers in a 1997 “Masterpiece Theatre” version of “Rebecca”), a mother (once) and a wife (twice). In 1982, at 43, she married her longtime live-in lover, Scottish businessman Archie Stirling (their daughter, Rachael, was then 4), and is still married to him. Preceding that were an eight-year relationship with married British TV director Philip Saville, and an 11-month marriage to flamboyant Israeli artist Menachem Gueffen. “Very curiously, morality says you shouldn’t live together outside the state of wedlock,” she told People in 1986. “And I say, until you are prepared to make the vows and stick by them, then that’s the only thing to do. I do care about marriage passionately. When it comes to a vow, I’m very proper.”

Rigg is also passionate about her acting career. She’s been the host of “Mystery” on PBS since 1989, when she took over from Vincent Price. Last year, she was named Cameron MacIntosh Professor of Theater at Oxford. The actress returns to television this fall, in the title role of “The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries,” a series set in the 1920s that chronicles the adventures of a woman detective. (No, she’s nothing like Emma Peel.) Next spring, Rigg will star in the “Masterpiece Theatre” adaptation of Henry James’ “The American.”

Chances are TV watchers now fall into two categories — those who think of her as a PBS fixture and those who still fantasize about Emma Peel. (She was voted “sexiest TV star of all time” in a recent TV Guide poll.) Rigg has said repeatedly that she’s surprised people still love “The Avengers.” Asked if she finds it annoying or pleasant to still be introduced as Emma, the actress tends to parry the question with the sort of finesse you’d expect from her famous character. “I think one of the important things is to be known,” she said to a roomful of TV critics on the eve of coming aboard “Mystery.” “And to be entirely practical. Whatever you’re known for you should be grateful for. Providing you’re not ashamed of it, which I’m not.”

Emma Peel lifted Rigg from the relative obscurity of the British theater, but the role has hardly been a road map for the rest of her career. Her one foray into American television, a short-lived NBC sitcom and “Mary Tyler Moore Show” clone called “Diana,” flopped in 1973. Her list of films — which includes “The Assassination Bureau” (1968), “A Little Night Music” (1978) and “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981) — is unremarkable.

Rigg’s most riveting work has been on the London stage and on the BBC, two mediums that have allowed her to forge an idiosyncratic second act. After “The Avengers,” Rigg rejoined the RSC at Stratford, then the National Theatre, but like most actresses, then and now, she found a paucity of roles for women in their 30s and 40s except as girlfriends and wives of male protagonists. In 1975, Rigg reappeared on TV, starring in the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production “In This House of Brede” on PBS. The series was based on the Rumer Godden classic about a businesswoman who decides to becomes a Benedictine nun.

A nun? After Emma Peel? Perhaps there really was nowhere to go after Emma. Still, Phillipa Talbot, woman of the cloth for “In This House of Brede,” is a much happier sort than most of the roles Rigg took on in middle age, a collection that might be described as poisonous women and toxic mothers. “I had to swallow the fact that my career has now reached the point where I play a mother,” she told TV critics in 1990 as she launched “Mother Love,” a miniseries for “Mystery.” In a role that has cast shadows over the rest of her career, she played a smothering, psychotic parent named Helena, an unstable woman whose husband had left her years earlier for another woman.

In the interim, Helena has become obsessively attached to her young son, Kit. We meet her on the day the grown-up Kit introduces her to his fiancie, then secretly goes off to visit his father. Kit tells his fiancie that when his mother found out about a visit with his father years before, she had tried to kill herself. “Disloyalty,” Helena likes to say, “is the most dreadful of crimes.” But Helena’s not just possessive; she’s also a dangerous criminal. We learn from flashbacks that she coldly murdered a childhood friend when the girl tried to make friends with someone else. After Kit’s marriage, when Helena learns of other “betrayals,” she murders her ex-husband’s second wife and attempts to poison her grandchildren. Finally, she tries to kill her beloved son in a rage so powerful that it takes three people to pull her off his supine body.

“She sucks his blood to stay alive,” is how another character describes Helena’s relationship with her son, a phrase that beautifully conjures Rigg’s performance. The actress evokes a madness — part cat, part vampire — that operates at the animal level. Rigg underplays Helena, brandishing a mix of physical technique and emotionally distanced line readings that underscores her character’s cold-blooded calculations. She shakes Helena from her disguise as a regal, self-possessed woman and reveals her as a monster, hunched over like a manic gargoyle. Rigg’s co-star, David McCallum (who played Ilya Kuryakin in the ’60s TV series “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”), described “Mother Love” as “four of the most terrifying hours of television I had ever watched.”

Ironically, Rigg’s comeback as a maternal nightmare came after spending a decade primarily raising her own daughter, now 21. “If, at the end of 25 years,” she told People, “it was said that I didn’t fulfill my potential as a mother and a wife, I would be heartbroken. But if they said, ‘She hasn’t developed as an actress as much as she might,’ I know the reasons why. And that as far as I’m concerned is good enough.”

Still, the hiatus wasn’t entirely her choice. Although she toured with “Colette” in 1982 and starred in the London production of “Sondheim’s Follies” in 1987, she told the New York Times’ Benedict Nightingale that by the early 1990s, she feared for her career. “I put my hand up and said adsum [present], and nobody wanted to know.” In many ways, her life echoes those of her RSC cohorts — Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith. Each made similar jumps, entering the theater world as sterling ingenues, falling out of sight as their first bloom faded and reemerging as cultural icons in late middle age. None of these women, however, have reclaimed their tiaras by forging the bizarre path that Rigg has taken.

Indeed, by choosing “Mother Love,” Rigg seemed to respond with a vengeance to her new status as a mature woman. She may have been right to turn down typical older-women roles that are essentially window dressing. “I’m not a character actress yet,” she told People in 1986. “If I’m clever about what parts I play, I’ll stay a leading lady for 15 years. Then I’ll switch to character roles.” But given the absence of parts that explore the complexities of ordinary middle-aged and older women’s lives, what’s left is harridans, shrews and monsters. (Parts like Jane Tennison in “Prime Suspect” don’t come along often, and Mirren got that one.) Rigg has used this unenviable situation to her advantage. She’s repeatedly jumped at chances to play mothers and older women who are scary, mean, obsessive — too awful to disappear into the background. The role of Mrs. Danvers, the creepy housekeeper and surrogate mother in “Rebecca,” won her an Emmy. With the demented Lady Dedlock in Dickens’ “Bleak House” for the BBC, she gave elegant dimension to an obscure character.

In case anyone wasn’t paying attention to her TV work, Rigg took her new identity as a viper onto the stage — first by actually sharing the stage with a viper. In the early 1990s, she teamed up with director Jonathan Kent, artistic director of London’s Almeida Theatre, who cast her as Cleopatra in John Dryden’s “All for Love,” the story of an older woman as desperate as she is powerful. A few years later, also for Kent, she played Medea, the infamous Euripides character who gave birth not only to Helena in “Mother Love” but to maniacal mothers everywhere. Rigg’s performance, reportedly unrelenting in its intensity and searing in its histrionics, is still the subject of debate among theatergoers. People tend to love it or hate it, but no one who saw it will forget it.

Kent also cast Rigg as the title character in the Bertolt Brecht classic “Mother Courage,” her one noble role in a menagerie of vultures. But by the time she showed up last year (the Almeida tour came to New York in January 1999) in a double bill featuring adaptations of Racine’s “Britannicus” and “Phedre,” Rigg had irrevocably recast herself as the consummate bitch mother. This is how Sheridan Morley of the International Herald Tribune described her in “Britannicus”: “Diana Rigg, lethally attired … snaps her elegant handbag like a crocodile closing its teeth, thereby setting the mood for a wonderfully sinister and evil evening.”

Indeed, by playing both Aggripina, the mother of Nero, and then the title character in “Phedre” on the heels of “Medea” and “Mother Love,” she’s embraced a career choice that nearly eclipses Emma Peel, albeit for a smaller audience. New York Times critic Ben Brantley, writing about her performances in the Racine plays, recalled that Rigg had seemingly “provided the last word on strangulating maternal figures in her sublimely creepy performance in the television drama” before going on to give even more nuanced portrayals of manipulative and obsessive bad moms onstage.

Is this a good thing? By thrusting herself into the maternal fray, Rigg avoided becoming a museum piece; never mind that she’s redefined motherhood as something to be very, very afraid of. But has she also sacrificed any chance of ever again using her skills as a comedian? Can Emma Peel, with her sly sense of humor and whiplash comic timing, ever reemerge? In “The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries,” Rigg won’t exactly come full circle. It’s apparently more drawing room comedy/whodunit than hip social satire. Rigg’s character is a stylish old lady detective who makes snide asides into the camera, not a modern woman who turns the world on its head.

Nonetheless, Rigg in any form is a wonder to see. As for Emma Peel, she’s survived the end of the Cold War, the advent of Austin Powers and the shadow of Uma Thurman in last year’s forgettable “Avengers” film. Would Rigg ever play Emma again? When a reporter asked her that question in 1989, she replied, “No, we won’t do it again … We never did.”

The movie’s main appeal would seem to be David Duchovny, star of television’s “The X-Files” (and of next summer’s “X-Files” movie, “Blackwood”), who is called upon to carry a drama that has none of the quirky trappings or comic infrastructure of his sci-fi TV show. And given the fact that the majority of the audience at the screening I attended walked right by the pile of free Duchovny posters available at the end of the movie, “Playing God” is essentially a cautionary tale for actors who reach beyond their limits — and possibly for their fans, as well.

The story, however, is not without promise. It’s about Eugene Sands, a drug-addicted surgeon who lost his license after a patient died on the operating table while he was working high. In an L.A. nightclub one night, he watches as the stranger standing next to him is gunned down. After hesitating, he rescues the victim, operating with objects on the bar and draining his wound with an impromptu apparatus made from straws and a plastic bottle. He goes home to get high, but is soon kidnapped and brought to meet Ray Blossom (Hutton), an impish gangster whose associate he had repaired in the bar. Blossom gives him $10,000.

Blossom, it turns out, is on the run from the Russian mobsters he’s cheated and is now pursuing more illicit deals with some Chinese counterfeiters. He sends Sands to repair another badly wounded underling. He even gets him to patch up a Russian mobster — just long enough for the guy to reveal what he’s done with Blossom’s “merchandise” and be shot dead for good. Blossom provides Sands with hotel rooms outfitted with operating equipment, even nurses, because he knows Sands can’t legally practice in a hospital. The tension is supposed to arise from Sands’ dilemma: by working for Blossom he can remain a doctor. But if he agrees to play, he’s compromising what little integrity he may have left. If he refuses, we presume, he risks his life.

It doesn’t help that Hutton never seems threatening. Sporting bleached-blond hair and a leather suit, he looks more like a minor rock star than the mastermind of a criminal operation. It’s not clear that he’s actually attracted to his moll, Claire, played by Angelina Jolie, or that he cares that the thugs in his employ are inept zombies. Thanks to a lackluster script (by Mark Haskell Smith, whose credits include a rewrite of “Anaconda”), Hutton doesn’t get much chance to do anything with his character. Still, I found myself using the downtime to wonder what had become of this actor who eschews commercial Hollywood product yet — until now — never seemed to be slumming.

But if Hutton’s Blossom is not fully realized, Duchovny’s character, Sands, doesn’t seem to be risking anything. He doesn’t have any life to run from, much less go back to. As played by Duchovny, he’s a cipher. Most importantly, he doesn’t seem to possess the ego of a surgeon who, as he explains it, drove himself to amphetamine addiction because he was obsessed about staying awake and never going off duty. In fact, he doesn’t possess any personality at all. That may come as no surprise to “X-Files” detractors, but for “X-Files” fans — myself included — there’s something demoralizing about seeing Duchovny stripped of cult appeal.

Indeed, what “Playing God” makes abundantly clear is that “The X-Files” is primarily a comedy. The deadpan interchanges between Duchovny and Gillian Anderson — who do have an authentic chemistry — are funny because they parody the affectless image of stodgy government agents. The show’s plots frequently send up its characters’ self-seriousness. (How else to explain the success of the doppelgdnger episode, in which an alien assumes Mulder’s shape and seduces Scully by injecting a pulse into that wooden character?) But until now, it wasn’t so apparent that Chris Carter’s beat-paranoia-till-it-squeals comic timing has been making up for what the actors lack. Here’s hoping that, post-”X-Files,” Duchovny isn’t playing actor — much less God.

At any rate, as the screen unfolds, so does our movie-viewing mind, trying desperately to make sense of what’s in front of us. The human eye always wants to recognize what it sees. At the same time, we want to believe that there are experiences that defy easy explanation. That’s the driving idea behind “Contact,” Robert Zemeckis’ intrepid movie version of Carl Sagan’s 1985 bestseller, which itself grew out of an idea that Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, once had for a movie. Faithful to Sagan’s brand of popularized science, the film never reaches beyond Hollywood spectacle and sentimentality.

And yet — as is the Sagan way — it lets science hold its own against religion without reducing either to mush. That hasn’t stopped Michael Medved, self-appointed Hollywood spokesman for family values, from declaring, on CNN’s “Crossfire,” that “Contact” is anti-religious. Did Rob Lowe’s depiction of a crackpot, Ralph Reed-esque Christian right leader hit a little close to home? (To get a look at what may be a growing backlash against the movie, check out the newsgroup rec.arts.movies.current-films.)

A great deal of the power of “Contact” comes through Jodie Foster. In her first role in three years (since 1994′s embarrassing “Nell”), she brings to the screen what’s possibly the most complete portrait of a scientist the movies have ever given us. A born skeptic, Ellie Arroway lost what little spiritual faith she might have once possessed as a result of losing her parents in childhood. She’s alone in the universe and she knows it, yet since the years when her father taught her to plumb the night skies with her ham radio, she’s wanted to believe there’s someone else out there.

She grows up and goes to work for SETI, the institute that studies radio waves from outer space, hoping to get a signal from little green men. Or — in Sagan’s conception — extraterrestrial mathematicians who transmit bleeps in groups of prime numbers. One day a sound pattern comes in that Ellie’s fellow astronomers agree is “not local.” Encrypted in the message — it comes via a television signal transmitting images of Hitler, the last broadcast the senders got from us — is a set of blueprints for some kind of transport vehicle. Ellie recognizes it as an invitation. Before long the White House is involved, along with the entire world, in sending a representative human to shake hands with an alien species.

Ellie is paired with Palmer Joss, a hunky seminarian-turned-presidential advisor played by Matthew McConaughey. With his golden halo of hair, he looks more like a young Christ than someone who attends White House briefings. He’s the perfect foil for Ellie: He believes in God. More important, he’s comfortable having experiences that his intellect can’t manage. He’s also taken with this woman. “How can I reach you?” he asks Ellie as he gives her his phone number, but it’s obvious to her that a phone call isn’t exactly what he means.

As romantic couplings go, McConaughey and Foster have a magnificent synergy. With their patrician good looks, they belong in a Victorian drawing room rather than a modern-day press briefing. And you don’t really root for them to go to bed so much as to orbit, magnificently, around each other. They’re mouthpieces for opposing ideas about the universe, yet they don’t eclipse each other. In fact, they seem like two parts of a wondrous whole, each lit by the same nourishing sun, driven by a burning curiosity — the real passion for knowledge that fuels both science and religion.

Thrown into the mix are James Woods as an arrogant national security advisor, Tom Skerritt as Ellie’s former mentor and John Hurt as S.R. Haddon, the sort of eccentric industrialist now requisite for movies involving expensive scientific endeavors. Thanks to Zemeckis’ Gump-like fondness for cultural montage, images of President Clinton have been manipulated so that he appears in press conferences on Ellie’s discovery. (It’s distracting, sure, but it works as a comic footnote on how most movies go out of their way not to specify a particular American president.)

As it labors through several false climaxes (the movie’s too long by a good half hour), “Contact” dishes out a large portion of feel-good sentiment. It’s one thing to stand up for faith — according to “Contact,” 95 percent of the world’s population believe in a higher being. What’s remarkable is the film’s respect for the scientific process. You can walk away from “Contact” thinking Ellie is an agent of heavenly wisdom and scientific miracles. Or you can take comfort in the fact that nothing she experiences ever contradicts our human ability to remain open-minded and thoughtful in the face of the unknowable.

OK, now here’s the tsk-tsking.

You won’t find any writing, acting or directing to speak of in “Batman & Robin,” the most sentimental of the Batman movies and the second directed by Schumacher (in between his film versions of John Grisham thrillers “The Client” and “A Time To Kill”). With George Clooney taking over the Bat-cape from Val Kilmer, the franchise may be safe. Lost beneath the overproduced fight scenes, the rubber nippled Clooney doesn’t really get a chance to embarrass himself, much less act. But the Bat-thrills are long gone. Worse, Kilmer’s recent career path — duds like “The Saint” and the bona fide turkey “The Island of Doctor Moreau” — seems downright glorious compared to any cachet the swoon-provoking “ER” actor is going to take away from this bomb.

But, then, what’s art compared to the sale of action figures?

In fact, when your last Batman movie was 1995′s highest grossing film, why clutter the next one with characters at all? It’s much easier to make a two-hour tableau in which human beings are reduced to toy status by an overwrought production scheme. Schumacher’s puppets — Batman, Robin, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy and the new Batgirl — cavort in a universe of industrial light and no magic. They’re dwarfed by a be-statued Gotham that is itself reduced to a computer-generated collection of cavities, shadows and multi-plane camera moves. Spatial relationships be damned. Watching the frenetic choreography of the fight and chase scenes — Batman and villains sliding down a dinosaur tail in a museum’s antiquities wing or racing up the outstretched arms and fingers of a Titan-like statue — it’s difficult to see what’s going on.

In fact, one of the film’s best jokes is obfuscated by the inept direction. When Batman and Robin (Chris O’Donnell) go after Mr. Freeze, they slip and slide on the icy surface the villain’s created on the museum floor. Then, recalling their vast arsenal of nifty gadgets, they press buttons on their heels and out pop ice skates on their boots. Clever, huh? I nearly missed it and only caught on when I remembered someone describing the scene to me beforehand.

Indeed, “Batman & Robin” is a movie made by machines for other machines to watch. If there are any humans out there still interested, here’s a checklist of Bat-villains and heroes.

Lucking out in the nifty costume department is Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl. Despite the tortured way the film introduces her (she’s butler Alfred’s daffy schoolgirl niece whose parents’ death provoked her new hobby of motorcycle racing). With her charisma, Silverstone would probably make a fine addition if human-scale actions ever find their way back into the Bat-story.

Lost amid all the flashiness of the updated Batmobile (and Robin’s Redbird motorcycle) are cameos by John Glover, Coolio, Vivica A. Fox and supermodel Vendela K. Thommessen. Elle MacPherson, as Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend, is, well, just lost.

The character most in search of better one-liners is Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy. As the only actor who actually compels your attention, she plays the villainess as a pencil-thin Mae West in Marie Antoinette hairdos. (Her alter ego, scientist Pamela Isley, is a demure librarian nursing a revenge fantasy.) She’s saddled with verbal clichis — from “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” to “The day of reckoning is coming.” Ted Baxter could write better copy. But could he deliver them with even a fraction of Thurman’s panache? Nah. Let’s give this villainess her own series.

As for you Arnold Schwarzenegger fans — sorry. As Mr. Freeze, a scientist turned villain when he fell into a vat of cryogenic liquid, Arnold looks like, alternately, the Tin Man, the Terminator and the chrome parts of a gargantuan, walking motorcycle. Under all that silver, his eyes are a ghastly red. But the real crime is that Schwarzenegger’s exuberance is pinned down. He’s like a moth squashed by an 18-wheeler. He’s also paralyzed by amazingly inert dialogue. How many lame jokes about cold can you fit into two hours? Buy a ticket and find out.

In fact, let’s just line up and put our cash into Schumacher’s pockets.

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The story’s about — need you ask? — how, while trying a drug lord for the killing of three policemen, a fresh-faced assistant district attorney discovers a lode of dirty cops, including, it seems, his father and his father’s partner. Sean Casey (Andy Garcia), the Irish cop-turned-assistant-DA hero, gets handed this career-making criminal case by Morgenstern, a district attorney with a political agenda. Casey’s policeman father (Ian Holm), riddled with bullets during the botched ambush of the drug lord, becomes an irresistible star witness in his son’s big case. (The script, written by Lumet, is based on the novel “Tainted Evidence” by Robert Daley.)

Young Casey wins, of course, but not before we meet Sam Vigoda (Richard Dreyfuss), a William Kuntsler-type lawyer who steps forward to defend drug lord Jordan Washington, and his second chair Peggy Lindstrom (Lena Olin, who’s utterly wasted here as Casey’s love interest). Initially, Casey doesn’t mind being used as Morgenstern’s political puppet, and his loyalty pays off when Morgenstern’s bad heart takes him out of the race and Casey becomes the candidate for DA. No sooner is he elected than the case against Washington starts to crumble. Thanks to the discovery of unlawful police involvement, the drug lord may go free.

Pretty simple stuff — especially for an audience weaned on Lumet’s landmark police dramas, “Serpico” and “Prince of the City,” and Lumet doesn’t get particularly memorable performances out of any of his actors. His Manhattan universe revolves around the Old World ethnic triad of Irish-Jewish-WASP interactions. (The film’s notion of a black drug lord, here played by newcomer Sheik Mahmud-Bey, is a musty, museum-quality stereotype.) As dated as it seems, though, the first act of “Night Falls” moves with the power of Lumet’s best storytelling. Particularly affecting is a stake-out scene in which Holm and his partner, James Gandolfini, prepare for their hit with an odd mix of enthusiasm (Gandolfini) and vulnerability (Holm). The denlike coziness of their undercover car is violently sliced open by a disheveled snitch who, with no warning, jumps out of the gutter and into the back seat.

Scenes like this — small dramas that have redeemed Lumet’s other boilerplate efforts (I’m thinking of “Q&A” and “Guilty as Sin”) from easy dismissal — can make you forget that Lumet is the same director who tried, in “Stranger Among Us,” to plop Melanie Griffith down in a community of Hasidic Jews. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough such moments in “Night Falls.” What’s downright stultifying, however, is that the director isn’t reaching beyond the moral complications he turned a cold eye on two, three and even four decades ago. Shocking in the ’60s and ’70s, the notion of police corruption is now an essential prop of even the most mundane TV cop drama.

That’s funny, since shows like “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order” (much less something as effervescent and morally challenging as the short-lived CBS drama “EZ Streets”) would never have come about without Lumet’s once pioneering filmmaking. But currently, with one foot in the great live TV plays of the 1950s and another pushing the dramatic pedal with ’60s idealism, Lumet can’t quite propel himself into the promised land. How is it that a man who has survived such innocence-killing events as Watergate, Vietnam and the Rosenberg case can still be moved by the story of an innocent’s realization that justice dwells in gray areas?

Lumet is oblivious to the way his own ideas about corruption might seem naive or two-dimensional to moviegoers and TV-watchers today. He should listen to Garcia talk. Casey’s multiethnic accent — explained by giving the character a Hispanic mother — conjures up the new world orders of Miami and Los Angeles (not to mention Atlanta, Akron and Peoria), where police corruption and societal compromise have not only matched the decibel level of New York’s but have overtaken it, spawning multifaceted moral crises that make Lumet’s Manhattan seem like Eden.

That may depend on how much you identify with the protagonists. Starring Mira Sorvino (“Mighty Aphrodite”) and Lisa Kudrow (“Friends”), “Romy and Michele” is not so much a fable as a white flag for the slacker generation as it hits the big 10-year mark since high school graduation. “Ten years! Where have I been?” asks Sorvino’s Romy in tones that make it clear she hasn’t really been able to keep track of herself, even if her green and blue nail polish does perfectly match her outfit.

One thing Romy does know, however, is that unlike her Sagebrush High classmate Heather (Janeane Garofalo), she hasn’t done anything as interesting as inventing quick-burning cigarette paper. No, since graduation, Romy has moved from Tucson to Los Angeles, along with her best friend Michele (Kudrow). The two unfocused young women now live in a fourth-floor walk-up in Venice, where they wile away the time going to clubs and watching “Pretty Woman” on video. “I can’t believe that even after watching it 36 times,” says Michele, “I never get tired of making fun of it.”

After a chance encounter with Heather, Romy talks Michele into planning a trip to the high school reunion — providing that the two find boyfriends and better jobs in the ensuing two weeks. This plan doesn’t pan out, so the duo decide to tell people they’re businesswomen, at one point asking a truck-stop waitress if the place has a “businesswoman’s lunch special.” Their scheme nearly dissolves when the waitress asks what business they’re in. Quick on the trigger, at least for airheads, Romy and Michele decide they will tell people they invented Post-its. That turning point ignites the story’s screwball dynamic, which snowballs when an argument develops over Michele’s claim that “I am the Mary and you are the Rhoda.”

Sitcom models aside, we learn from flashbacks that neither Romy nor Michele were the popular girls in school. Nor were they science nerds, yearbook journalists or drama club joiners. They were loners who hung out with each other. Michele spent high school in a body brace for scoliosis, while Romy battled her image as the fat girl (even though the Romy we see in flashback is plump only by Hollywood’s anorexic standards). The duo also did time as the victims of a catty girl clique. So why go back at all?

With its depiction of high school as a huge pecking order organized by each person’s power to reject others, “Romy and Michele” resembles a lot of other movies. And that’s one reason it’s emotional stakes aren’t very high — at least on the surface. What makes it interesting, despite its uneven comedy, is that it lets the audience both identify with and be appalled by its main characters. For those in their 20s who see themselves as left holding the bag while the Baby Boomers got all the postwar goodies, in real life, Kudrow and Sorvino prove that the bag’s not entirely empty yet.

The actresses are playing dimwits so generic that when one says to the other, “You look really great with blonde hair and black roots” it hardly matters that, five seconds later, you can’t remember which one spoke. Kudrow is doing her usual seamless shtick, fine-tuned by countless “Friends” episodes. Sorvino spends the movie trying to find her mark — is she playing a dumb blonde or parodying one? — but not exactly hitting it. Nonetheless, audiences know that these two successful actresses, both Ivy League grads and celeb photo-essay subjects, are in real life anything but underemployed slackers.

Likewise, Garofalo, who’s carved out a career as the teen loser who grew up to be hipper than the rest of us can even hope to be. A flip through Romy and Michele’s high school yearbook reveals her black-garbed character posing with her back to the camera. Garofalo’s performance here is strangely lackluster, but her presence is not without measure. With such cutting-edge show-biz credits as “The Ben Stiller Show,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Saturday Night Live” to her credit, Garofalo may damn well play the eye-rolling outsider of her generation, but in real life, she’s probably the person voted most welcome at her high school reunion.

To describe any more of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” would be to gnaw away at its fragile comic underpinnings. (The best of the humor comes from the actresses’ line readings anyway.) As lightweight as it is, it’s easy to feel real affection for the movie. Think of it as a sincere plea to take the Romy and Micheles of the world as successful on their own terms, embracing, as much as humanly possible, their penchant for polyester and vinyl.