`Digging To China': A Bit Too Much Effort

------------------------------- Movie review

XX 1/2 "Digging to China," with Kevin Bacon, Evan Rachel Wood, Marian Seldes, Mary Stuart Masterson, Cathy Moriarty. Directed by Timothy Hutton, from a script by Karen Janszen. 98 minutes. Metro Cinemas. "PG" - Parental guidance advised because of "thematic elements and some emotional moments." -------------------------------

The surest route to an Academy Award, it seems, is playing or creating a character who's not all there. Just ask Dustin Hoffman ("Rain Man"), Tom Hanks ("Forrest Gump") or Billy Bob Thornton ("Sling Blade").

Kevin Bacon has been passed over time and again for performances that should have earned him Oscar consideration (most recently for "Telling Lies in America" and "Murder in the First"), possibly because of his status as the subject of a six-degrees celebrity game. Or maybe the academy members can't take him seriously because of "Footloose."

Whatever the reason, Bacon has now taken the Hoffman / Hanks / Thornton route, playing Ricky, a physically uncoordinated, mentally retarded 30-year-old who develops a unique friendship with Harriet, a fantasy-addicted 10-year-old girl (Evan Rachel Wood). Bacon is a gifted actor, and it would be nice to report that he pulls it off, but in too much of "Digging to China" his twitching and posturing is transparently the work of an actor trying too hard.

Part of the problem is a script by Karen Janszen, one of the writers on "Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home," that makes Ricky seem smart at times and incredibly naive at others. The period is the late 1960s, and Janszen seems to be making a statement about changing attitudes toward disabled people, but she doesn't follow through.

Ricky's cautious mother, played by Marian Seldes, is the one consistent, credible character, and Seldes ends up giving the most persuasive performance. But Harriet's apparent mother (Cathy Moriarty) is portrayed as a hopeless incompetent, seemingly incapable of driving the right way in one-way traffic, while Harriet's sister, Gwen (Mary Stuart Masterson), is a mass of contradictions.

She sleeps around (Harriet believes she has a future as a nurse because she's "always making some guy feel better"), she makes things particularly difficult for Ricky and she's harboring a big secret. But we don't have a clue as to why she acts as she does.

The first-time director, Timothy Hutton, who won a 1980 Oscar for playing a suicidal teenager in "Ordinary People," does his best to create an idyllic mood for Ricky and Harriet's adventures. His cinematographer is Jorgen Persson, a Swedish veteran who has worked on everything from "Elvira Madigan" to "My Life as a Dog" to "The Best Intentions."

Wood, who has an important role in the upcoming, locally filmed Nicole Kidman / Sandra Bullock movie, "Practical Magic," is the movie's chief charm. Thanks largely to her, the relationship with Ricky is affecting in a Scout Finch / Boo Radley way - which may be why Elmer Bernstein, the composer of the original "To Kill a Mockingbird" score, was hired to do the music.