Movie Reviews : ‘Rude Awakening’ for Anachronistic Hippies

Imagine a movie about a pair of hippie radicals, cut off from the world for 20 years, suddenly being whisked to present-day Manhattan. Former “Saturday Night Live� writer Neil Levy took this idea to producer Aaron Russo, who in turn worked with Levy and Richard LaGravenese to develop the endearing but uneven “Rude Awakening� (citywide).

Levy and LaGravenese have come up with some of the funniest and most inspired comic moments of any picture released this year, but Russo, in tandem with co-director David Greenwalt, should have resisted making his directorial debut with so highly verbal and complex a script. Co-directors Russo (who produced such hits as “The Rose� and “Trading Places�) and Greenwalt (a writer with “Secret Admirer� and two Disney Sunday Night Movies as his directorial credits) are unable to give satire the crisp form and sharp pacing it needs to hit the mark squarely. “Rude Awakening� is more enjoyable than many slicker but less ambitious films, yet it could have been so much better.

Eric Roberts and Cheech Marin are Fred and Jesus, a couple of long-haired Greenwich Village anti-war protesters who take flight to the fictional Central American country of Managuador, where they establish a commune, refusing all contact with the outside world. Inevitably, the turmoil in Central America overtakes them, with a dying American agent entrusting to Fred top-secret papers outlining an American plan for invading Managuador. “It’s Vietnam all over,� exclaims Fred, who immediately departs for Manhattan, where he intends somehow to stop the war. Accompanying him is Jesus, a comical pothead still hallucinating from a long-ago government LSD experiment.

Fred’s old girlfriend, Petra (Julie Hagerty), a quintessential flower child, has now become Princess Petra, a shrill, neurasthenic fashion designer with a $2-million co-op. Hagerty is deliciously zany, but the one time the film comes together and really clicks is when Petra, Fred and Jesus descend upon another old friend, Sammy (Robert Carradine), a businessman who makes $300,000 a year with his chain of tanning salons.

It just so happens that Sammy and his wife, June (Cindy Williams), are in the midst of a crucial interview with a couple (Andrea Martin, Buck Henry) who are to pass on their suitability for an apartment in an exclusive co-op. This sequence is high farce, as good as anything in “Arthur.� Henry, Martin, Williams and Carradine put a fresh, hilarious spin on, respectively, the smug ultra-conservative, the falling-down drunk, the up-tight wife and the husband who’s trying to control the situation while yielding his sympathies to his old hippie pals.

Nothing that precedes or follows has the tightness and punch of this sequence. The terrific actors and the outrageous dialogue would seem to have fired up Russo and Greenwalt to rise to the occasion. If, otherwise, their pacing is slack, they clearly have rapport with actors, who include Louise Lasser as the radicals’ laid-back den mother and Cliff De Young as a frenzied fed. The cast is wonderful, though Roberts, for all his charm and humor, is overly mannered, needing far more control than the directors provide him. The ending of “Rude Awakening� (rated R for blunt language) owes a considerable debt to Frank Capra, “Meet John Doe� in particular, and, sad to say, is beyond Russo and Greenwalt’s abilities to keep it from foundering in undue sentimentality.