Three Wishes (PG)

‘Three Wishes’ (PG)

"Three Wishes," the aggressively wholesome romantic fantasy starring Patrick Swayze, demonstrates again the value of bad movies in interpreting our collective dreams and preoccupations.

Directed by Martha Coolidge from a script by Clifford and Ellen Green, the movie is a sort of modern fairy tale of the "It's a Wonderful Life" variety dealing with the conflict between conformity and individualism. It begins in the present as Tom Holman (Michael O'Keefe) and his family are about to depart for their summer vacation. However, because he has just lost his business and may even have to sell the house, Tom can't work up much enthusiasm for the trip. Then he sees a lonely figure trudging across the road with a scruffy but adorable mutt trotting alongside.

Instantly, Tom is transported back to another Memorial Day, in 1954. He is 11 and growing up in a California suburb. On this day, a similar figure enters his life, changing it forever. It all begins when his mother, Jeanne (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), accidentally sideswipes a vagabond, Jack (Swayze). He has to have his broken leg put in a cast, and because she feels responsible, Jeanne insists that he stay until it mends.

Jeanne's husband is missing in Korea, and she has been trying to raise their two sons, Tom (played as a boy by Joseph Mazzello) and the 5-year-old Gunny (Seth Mumy), and start her own business all by herself. And she's been doing a pretty good job. Still, she worries that she is being selfish. Everybody else in her circle is married, and when an old boyfriend (David Marshall Grant) begins to show interest, she wonders whether she should settle down and give her boys a secure home.

Tom in particular suffers from the loss of his father. All he wants to do is fit in, but when the other boys in the neighborhood play their father-and-son games, he's always left out. Naturally, Tom needs for Jack to assume the role of surrogate, but Jack won't play that. A sort of hobo sage, Jack wants no part of the American dream as it is being lived in this stifling environment.

That a fairly reasonable woman like Jeanne would accept family counseling from a drifter may seem implausible, but then Jack isn't just another bum. From the moment he arrives, it's clear that there's something "different" about him. It's not just that he sunbathes in the nude or transforms Tom and his loser Little League teammates into winners by having them sit in a circle and meditate. Jack, it turns out, is some sort of ghost or angel or genie, and his job is to go around the world in search of deserving families, to whom he grants three wishes.

Actually, this aspect of the film doesn't kick in until very late, and by then the audience will have ceased to care. For most of the movie, we're left to wonder who or what Jack really is and how we're supposed to react to him. The relationship between Jack and Jeanne seems based, for the most part, on her need for a strong male figure to help her get her head straight. And even if the stranger does encourage Jeanne to persevere in her dreams, there's an underlying paternalism—and condescension—in the filmmakers' attitudes toward her. It's also an indication of the movie's divided heart that, through Jack, it rejects '50s-style American materialism while yearning in nearly every other moment for the stable, homespun values that accompany that way of life.

As Jeanne, Mastrantonio can't overcome her character's lack of definition. She's not bad; she's just undone by the script. To a certain extent, the same is true of Swayze. For the most part, his work here is grounded and authoritative. There's a sadness in Jack that Swayze brings to the fore, and that makes us take a second look at a character we might otherwise dismiss as an achingly labored poetic concept.

In the end, the movie cops out completely, abandoning the lip service it has given to forging one's own path and opting instead for the comforts of the traditional nuclear family. Ultimately, Tom receives another pearl of wisdom from this otherworldly beatnik. His message: Be happy in what you have. Now there's a blast against the Establishment.

Three Wishes is rated PG.

Copyright The Washington Post

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