MOVIE REVIEW : HERE A MESS, THERE A JOY: ‘JOSHUA THEN AND NOW’

“Joshua Then and Now” (Music Hall) reunites Canadian director Ted Kotcheff and author/screen-writer Mordecai Richler, who burst upon an appreciative world with “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” in 1974. This time they’ve made a tumult of a movie, or maybe the tangy Yiddish word tummel is closer: a noisy disorder.

The film is a mess, yet it’s one of those rather endearing messes that you remember well after all the cool, well-made nothings have faded from the brain. There are characters and performances here as rich and as memorably astringent as some from “The Horse’s Mouth,” although you could hope in vain for Joyce Cary’s (and Alec Guinness’) narrative strength. “Joshua” reportedly comes in two versions: this film, almost two hours long, and a four-hour miniseries to be shown next year over the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Perhaps they cut the wrong parts.

Its hero is the caustic, disruptive literary maven Joshua Shapiro (James Woods), whose life we examine in labored flashback. Joshua is another battler from the Montreal ghetto, who courts and marries a quintessential WASP, Pauline (the beautiful but numb Gabrielle Lazure), and conducts an ongoing, full-scale war against the British/Canadian establishment.

We see, and perhaps even believe, him as a struggling young writer whose fortunes begin to turn in England as he meets novelist and Spanish Civil War veteran Sidney Murdoch (Ken Campbell, an actor who may eventually have as many crochets and usefully distinctive mannerisms as Hugh Griffith). Sidney is pointedly outrageous; it’s part of his charm. At one tiddly juncture in their lives, he and Joshua concoct a bogus literary scandal which, once planted, lies in the body of the film like a land mine.

It has just gone off as the movie opens, leaving Joshua’s life in shambles. So, under the guise of agonizing re-examination, we can be flashed back from boyhood onward, while Joshua waits for news of Pauline, who has decamped. You could use this whole opening sequence, and indeed most of the film’s voice-over narration, as a textbook example of why original authors, understandably besotted with their own words and/or structure, should be kept away from adaptation chores, leaving such to persons less involved and more firm. (Then again, in four hours it might, well, be a meandering joy.)

As the flashbacks unroll, we see Joshua’s upbringing and begin to understand him--faintly. His pop, Reuben (Alan Arkin), is an ex-boxer and small-time gangster with a singular love for, and interpretation of, the New Testament. Mom (Linda Sorensen) is a free spirit in the Gypsy Rose Lee mold. This boyhood section is long, but when Arkin is on screen, passing on to his teen-age son the facts of life, foreplay, boxing and the Bible, there’s almost no place better to be. It’s later, when he’s a burgeoning literary figure, that Joshua first spots the unattainable Pauline at a Ban-the-Bomb rally in London. She is not only married but comes complete with a Canadian senator (Alexander Knox) for a father and a dashing, impecunious wastrel (Michael Sarrazin) for a brother. So of course Joshua must have her. Then he must undo her by bringing her back to Canada, to parade her WASPishness before his boyhood pals and show up her country-club cronies as the cads they are.

This section is pungently, nastily well written and played, as though you’d crossed Budd Schulberg with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woods somehow manages to make Joshua bearable, something of a feat since actually he’s devious, vindictive and nasty. However, the story really revolves around Pauline (and Joshua’s passion for her), and we get only limp loveliness from Lazure where there should have been a full-bodied character.

There is also the sense of central figures whirling by in a disjointed procession, more literary than filmic. For real enjoyment, what you must settle for are the snippets and the rhythms that Woods, Arkin, Sarrazin and Knox create. In all the manic fuss and the dropped-stitch screenplay, they let you forgive a lot.