‘Mortal Thoughts’ (R)

With director Alan Rudolph, mood is everything. And mostly, it's mood indigo, quirky blues played late and low in some seedy nightclub of the soul. His 12th feature, "Mortal Thoughts," a mystery of feminine mystique, doesn't grip or grab or even seduce, it surrounds us the way sad music does.

Like his earlier "Trouble in Mind," "Choose Me" and "Remember My Name," this movie manages to be more a question of character -- people cut loose from their moorings -- than of modus operandi. The mystery is that ordinary people can get themselves into such muddy water. Here it is two Bayonne, N.J., hairdressers with ethnic roots and nasal intonations, who try to cover up a murder without destroying their friendship.

Demi Moore and Glenne Headly star as Cynthia and Joyce, best friends since childhood as we can see in the happy home movies that roll under the opening credits. Alas, the girls grow up and marry -- an obnoxious salesman (John Pankow) in Cynthia's case and an abusive lout (Bruce Willis) in Joyce's -- and their lives turn dull and dangerous, respectively. Willis is the corpse as villain. Like a victim in a Perry Mason teleplay, the only thing surprising about his death is that he lasted so long in the first place.

The story opens after the fact. The police are closing in on the friends, who have clumsily tried to make the death look like part of a robbery attempt. The interrogation pits Moore's hand-wringing Cynthia against Harvey Keitel's tooth-sucking police detective. Keitel, who probably ought to be designated a national treasure, is a wonderful foil for her tearful frailty. A cross between a father confessor and a badgering Columbo, he plays on Cynthia's guilty conscience to finally get to the bottom of things.

Through a series of flashbacks, we return to the scene of the crime and to the domestic tribulations that led up to it. The trouble began, Cynthia remembers, the day James and Joyce married, fought bitterly over the wedding money and made up as they danced to the mawkish strains of "Just the Way You Are." They are the Honeymooners, only he really would send her to the moon.

"Mortal Thoughts" is a portrait of three couples really: Cynthia and Arthur, Joyce and James, and Joyce and Cynthia. And writers William Reilly and Claude Kerven have built a thriller within the dynamics of their variously convenient, sick and dutiful relationships. An ambitious man, Arthur asks Cynthia to break off the relationship with the other couple. But she is drawn to the daily drama they generate, the sexual energy, the love and hate.

Since much of it was improvised, it is hard to say whether the dark, almost incidental humor is the work of the actors or the writers. But it's there, along with the pervasive mood, like a thin light in the fog. The moviemakers have set out to interpret the inner workings of abusive relationships in their boundless variety. Alas, their ambitions are far grander than their abilities.

"Mortal Thoughts" is rated R for language and abusive behavior.