‘Native Son’ (PG)

Richard Wright would have a hard time recognizing Bigger Thomas, his "Native Son," in the current movie version of his agonizing story.

Forty-six years after its initial publication, Wright's novel remains an angry, impassioned study of punishment and crime -- the punishment of chronic segregation and racism leading the 19-year-old Bigger inexorably toward a set of horrifying murders, a terrifying manhunt and a sham trial just a rope removed from a lynching.

But director Jerrold Freedman's "Native Son," which opens in Washington today, transforms the novel into an all-too-genteel crime story, denuded of rage, devoid of social and historic context. Despite a powerful performance by newcomer Victor Love in the title role, the film reduces Bigger from a potent symbol and archetype to just one more victim of social inequities beyond his control. And though Wright wrote about a troubled society in which blacks were treated as subhumans, this "Native Son" is hardly more than a period film about a troubled youth who seems to be having a bad day.

In fact, Bigger Thomas is having a bad life. In the opening scene -- the part of the film most faithful to Wright's text -- Bigger wakes up in the one-room Chicago slum apartment that he shares with his mother (Oprah Winfrey) and two siblings (his father having been killed in a Mississippi race riot years before). Bigger's first act on waking up is to corner and kill a huge rat, which turns out to be a harbinger.

Though he's observed the white world in movie house fantasies, Bigger has never had any real encounters with whites. Now the welfare department has forced him to take a job as a chauffeur for the wealthy and apparently liberal Dalton family. Thrust into this new environment, Bigger's feelings vacillate wildly among fear, disgust, inadequacy and hatred. The Daltons' provokingly liberal daughter (Elizabeth McGovern) and her communist lover (Matt Dillon) try to befriend Bigger, forcing him into situations of false equality and intimacy that confuse and repulse him even more.

At the end of his first day of work, Bigger is forced to sneak the dead-drunk daughter back to her room. All his life, he has been treated like a criminal simply for being black, and now he's convinced his presence in the daughter's room could never be rationalized or forgiven. He is like the rat, cornered by circumstance, instinctively seeking escape. When the blind Mrs. Dalton comes into the room, Bigger tries to quiet the girl to avoid detection, and accidentally smothers her in the process. Murder leads to cover-up, discovery, flight, capture, trial and execution.

Taking off from this basic plot, Wright created a swirling novel of ideas, many of them as troubling to blacks as to whites. But director Freedman and producer Diane Silver seem to have missed the complexity of "Native Son," turning it into a pious liberal document. The filmmakers have simplified, condensed and emasculated Wright's angry prose to the point of ridiculousness. All the moral horror of black life in segregated America is toned down, from Bigger's fear and hatred of white people, to the violence he directs at his friends and his indifference to his own family, to the hateful actions of most of the whites in the book.

The horror of Bigger's first murder is diluted (in the book, he must decapitate his victim to stuff her body into a furnace; in the film, she fits nicely, though this destroys one of Wright's most potent symbols). The second, even more brutal killing -- of his black girlfriend -- is eliminated altogether. Bigger's trial, which takes up more than a third of the novel and which brings out so much of Wright's thoughts and feelings on racism, justice and social responsibility, is compressed into a couple of brief scenes. The defense lawyer's final plea, a blistering indictment of American society, is condensed from 18 pages to two nonspecific sentences.

Some of the problem may have been the film's tiny budget ($2 million, with all of the name actors working for scale). But Richard Wesley's screenplay is the major culprit. Wesley never overcomes the central challenge posed by Wright's book, in which Bigger's complexity -- and the context for the controversy raging around him -- is contained outside the dialogue.

Wright's Bigger is hardly a sympathetic character, much less a hero, and he is neither eloquent nor loquacious. A less skilled, less intuitive actor than Love would have been a disaster in the part. But while Love seems perfect, Wesley's script is simply too literal: It gives him nothing beyond surfaces to work with. Accurate scenery and a determined supporting cast are poor substitutes for Wright's rich explication. And the James Mtume sound track would sound more appropriate in a remake of "Superfly."

In the novel, Bigger is so far outside the margins, devoid of family and friends, cowering in a sense of inadequacy and deprivation, that it's little wonder he's so brutal. Sullen and unstable, he lacks conscience, hope, love and religion -- the classic outsider and invisible man, addressed as "boy" or "colored boy" or "nigger," but never treated as a man. Love's intense performance shows the shattering results of this debasement, but not its roots.

Ironically, Bigger finds the first real meaning to his life in his acts of violence. He is no longer dislocated in society, but identified, and there is no guilt, no repentance. For the first time, he feels he has mastered his own fate, that his killings have brought order and meaning to his life. This act of will is the shocking culmination of Bigger's revolt against the oppression of white society -- and that self-realization is at the heart of "Native Son."

"I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em," Bigger tells his lawyer toward the end of the film. The lawyer cannot understand, and the tragedy is that few others can either. This film won't help, unless you read the book.

"Native Son" is rated PG and contains some violence and profanity.