'De'Ath in the Suburbs' By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 13, 1998

John Hurt (left) and Jason Priestley star in "Love and Death on Long Island." (Lions Gate Films)

That's one of the droll pleasures in Richard Kwietniowski's "Love and Death on Long Island," which takes Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," the compact 1912 meditation on art, death and boychicks on the sunny Adriatic, and reinserts it into the endless banality of a New York 'burb.

That's also the source of much of the film's considerable quotient of wit: The Grand Questions which so befuddled Mann are re-asked in a venue whose utter inanity comically belittles them. Unrequited, doomed love for a youth named Tadzio in Venice is tragic; unrequited, doomed love for a youth named Ronnie outside a Long Island cheeseburger joint called "Chez D'Irv" is a giggle.

Mann's Aschenbach, the German writer, has become Giles De'Ath, the British one, in the guise of John Hurt, he of the face so scuffed by age and disappointment it looks like the leather floor of a Hun yurt on the fifth expedition beyond the Rhine. Such fallen grandeur! Such molecular density! The flesh doesn't sag so much as surrender before your very eyes, its ripeness lost in a downward gyre toward rot and chaos that will crash at the intersection of Golgotha and Goetterdaemmerung. Oh, and by the way: De'Ath? Pardon me, Church Lady, but could that spell . . . Death?

In any event, as does Aschenbach, so too does Mr. De'Ath initially believe in the power of durch hal ten, artistic endurance. His is the ascetic life of utter control, isolated in a house in London, writing in longhand with a fountain pen in a three-piece suit and tie, served only by a mousy housekeeper. Then, as Mann says: "Beauty can pierce one like a pain." Or as De'Ath would have it: "Ouch!"

Ludicrous circumstances contrive to place De'Ath in the presence of his Tadzio, but it's not on the beach at Venice, it's in a cinema where he's gone to get out of the rain. He thought he was buying a ticket for an E.M. Forster film (inside joke: Forster's motto was "Only connect," and De'Ath is about to connect), but instead he wanders into the giddy bun-quivers of an American import grandiloquently called "Hot Pants College II." There the presumably heretofor hetero Giles makes acquaintance with the sleek cheeks, bedknob cheekbones, smooth lips, froth of frosted hair, alabaster forehead and pale blue eyes of Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestly).

It's love at first ogle. So smitten is De'Ath he abandons his discipline in a trice and becomes the proud possessor of a secret life of adoration. He goes to a store and is looking at VCRs so that he may sample at his leisure the entire Bostock oeuvre. "Uh, sir," says the clerk gently, "those are microwave ovens."

That's another source of humor: Giles's infatuation with Ronnie yanks him into contact with the most plastic aspects of American popular culture, like video rental places, teen magazines, answering machines, supermarkets and cheeseburgers. Imagine the Brit twit Ronald Firbank plucked from a garden party in Mayfair in 1936 and deposited, almost instantly, at a Silver Spring Burger King today. Imagine the wrinkle of that aquiline nose, the sniff of those great nostrils, the weird circuitry shorting out behind those refined eyes. Hurt gets all this in small, dry doses; his performance is like a brilliant symphony played on teacups.

Those who love to fish for subtexts will have a fancy old time in this film. For at around this point, "Love and Death on Long Island" becomes an odd, mildly gay gloss on "Lolita." It's about a courtly, worldly European intellectual seduced to the point of madness by a youthful sprite of American pop cult. And, like Humbert Humbert's ordeal by humiliation, so does Giles suffer such a fate. He goes to Long Island, where he's learned the young actor lives, and cagily inserts himself in the young man's life by engineering an "accidental" meeting with his model wife (Fiona Loewi).

Giles, of course, is not without his charms, and he quickly manages entry into Ronnie's life and inner circle, which consists of exactly nobody. So what would you expect from a narcissist? Other than a mirror, what does he need? But Ronnie somehow feels the old man's love, and responds. It's all furtive, muffled, doomed, played out against the bright primary colors of the New Land (Giles believes he wants to take Ronnie to London to star in art films about which he knows, of course, nothing). Yet it's not really tragic, though it must end in death. You have to give it to a man named De'Ath: At last he's getting a sense of Li'Fe.

Some things don't work so well. Priestly is pleasant but dim; he should have had more animal heat. The parodies of American teen movies don't sparkle with nearly the same brilliance as Hurt.

But John Hurt lights the farthest, darkest corners of this film. He makes it sing. He isn't De'Ath in Venice, he's life in Garden City.