Formula Family

"THAT'S BARRETT HALL"

"No, dummy. It's Emerson"

The film version of Erich Segal's first novel Love Story, is traditional Freshman Week entertainment for good reason--it combines the most tearful of romances with the hope that true love can be found at Harvard. But Segal's latest. Which opens in Boston area theaters Friday, won't as easily endear itself to Cantabridgians. Erich Segal, who wrote the screenplay, as well as the original novel, for Man, Woman and Child, has deserted fair Harvard for the University of Southern California (cleverly disguised as a "Southern California University") where Bob Beck with teaches English literature. The sentimental appeal remains, embodied not in a single obsessive love, but in Beckwith's conflicting commitments to his wife, his daughters, and to the son he never knew he had.

Martin Sheen as the much-loved Professor Beckwith does all the things Professor Segal wishes he could do at Yale. He guarantees a grade-conscious physics student an A simply for enrolling in his Shakespeare course, saying, "I'll feel safer knowing there's a physcist out there who's read Shakespeare. "He puts his job on the line to save the humanities. At home he is the perfect husband and father, playing with his daughters and good-naturedly mediating their disputes Bob and his wife Sheila (Blythe Danner) share their professional triumphs and problems and seem to believe, as their friends do, that theirs is the perfect marriage.

Their idyllic life is interupted when Bob unexpectedly learns that a doctor with whom be had a brief affair in France 10 years ago earlier had borne him a son. Stunned. Bob returns home to destroy Sheila's image of their marriage as honest and perfect. He insists. "She meant nothing to me"! Sheila, tearful and revulsed: "Don't touch me!" The audience has seen it all before.

The Beckwiths invite the boy, Jean-Claude Guerin, to visit them. The tyke(Sebastian Dungan) turns out to be an E.T. figure. His personality is based entirely on his foreignness: Bob's daughter Jessica (Arlene Mclntyre) likes him because he speaks French, and Bob makes the obligatory American attempt to explain baseball to the child. And like E.T., Jean-Claude's very presence causes problems, especially for adults.

In a number of overdramatized scenes, the tensions Jean-Claude causes between Bob and Sheila and Jean-Claude are unpacking his suitcase; their eyes meet and they stare at each other for two full minutes, The boy looks guilty, despite the fact that he does not know he is Bob's son. This excuse for tension is broken when Sheila's daughter enters the room.

THROUGHOUT. we hear about the crisis in the Beckwith's marriage far more than we see it. Bob and Sheila each have the obligatory close friend to whom they express their fears that the perfect marriage is finished. In a screaming match at the home of Sheila's friend. Sheila accuses Bob of insensitivity to her inability to cope with the situation--with apparent illogic, since Sheila happens to have rebuffed Bob's attempts to communicate, not the other way around. The tension can't be too terrible, since the two Backwith daughters never seem to notice it.

The adults represent the full range of standard reactions to the situation. Sheila's friend Margo is a modern woman , who considers one affair in 10 years "practically celibacy." Bob's friend Bernie, a lawyer and a big sports fan, warns him not to wreck his marriage because "if you guys get divorced, I can only represent one of you." Bob quickly develops the stereotypical father's pride for his son. Sheila sees herself as the old-fashioned wife unprepared for the infidelities of a modern marriage but too much in love with her husband to leave him. Their attitudes are too time-worn to give them any reality as characters.

All in all, one would hope that a "perfect marriage" could deal with the strain of a long-ago affair more maturely. One might also hope that a Yale professor would rise above the cliches that worked so well for him the first time, but no such luck. This is just a weak excuse to take out the handkerchiefs.