`Shadrach': A Mixed Bag Of A Styron Short Story

Movie review XX 1/2 "Shadrach," with Harvey Keitel, Andie MacDowell, John Franklin Sawyer, Scott Terra. Directed by Susanna Styron, from a script by Styron and Bridget Terry. 91 minutes. Broadway Market. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised because of subject matter.

William Styron's daughter, Susanna, directed and co-wrote this spotty adaptation of her father's semi-autobiographical 1978 short story.

The movie was made with care and feeling, and at times it's quite moving, especially when Harvey Keitel and Andie MacDowell are given a scene or two that doesn't resemble anything they've done before. They create three-dimensional characters who clearly balance each other in marriage, especially when they are bound together in poverty during the Depression.

At other times, "Shadrach" rambles, failing to make good on its implicit promise that it will tell us more about its middle-class 10-year-old hero, Paul Whitehurst (Scott Terra), who attaches himself to the destitute bootleggers, Vernon and Trixie Dabney (Keitel and MacDowell), who are trying to raise several children in rural Virginia. Martin Sheen is the narrator who provides the adult voice for Paul.

Nor does the movie make much of its title character, a 99-year-old ex-slave (John Franklin Sawyer), who appears one day, announcing his intention to be buried on the Dabney property. He has walked all the way from Alabama to locate his childhood home, which was once a wealthy plantation.

Shadrach is a heavy symbol, identified at one point as one of the last African Americans to be "born in bondage," but he's not much as a flesh-and-blood character. His most memorable scene, in which he accidentally soils himself in the Dabney car, ends up belonging to MacDowell, who treats the episode with such unembarrassed practicality that her reaction becomes the focal point.

This may be the best work MacDowell has done on film. Gently chiding her husband for his impatience with the old man, taking charge of situations that clearly call for her unpretentious authority, she has rarely seemed so natural and compelling a figure.

This is also the most carefully shaded performance Keitel has given in some time. Somehow he gets inside this essentially fair man, who explodes with racist, foul-mouthed rage when he's frustrated, and makes us understand that Vernon doesn't mean what he's saying. His actions speak louder than his hurtful words.

One of the film's executive producers is Jonathan Demme, the director of another new film about the legacy of slavery, "Beloved," which is based on a much more ambitious work.

At its best, "Shadrach" demonstrates the advantages of adapting short fiction rather than novels to a 90-minute format. The actors are given space to explore people rather than plot.

Yet the material still feels slight and undeveloped, especially in the case of the one-dimensional character who gives the story its name.