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Arts & Entertainment Preview - January 1999 B Y   E L L A   T A Y L O R Stealing Booty     The General The movie gangster carries the weight of our fear of the lawless wild card, and our desire to be him as he merrily thumbs his nose at law and order. In his new movie, The General, John Boorman, the talented director of Deliverance, The Emerald Forest, and the recent Beyond Rangoon, seeks to humanize rather than glamorize (well, maybe a little) the life of the notorious Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, whose dazzlingly staged robberies confounded the police, the IRA, the Church, and the State in the 1980s. With his hair plastered to one side and one hand perennially shielding his face to avoid identification, Cahill is brilliantly portrayed by the hefty Irish actor Brendan Gleeson (I Went Down, The Butcher Boy) as a man with an almost infinitely elastic emotional range. By turns craven, sadistic, and sheepish, Cahill was a self-styled Robin Hood who loved to give as much as he loved to steal. He was also a devoted mate to his wife (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and, with her consent, her sister (Angeline Ball), with whom he had several children. Amid a slew of intelligent supporting actors, Jon Voight stands out as Inspector Ned Kenny, the world-weary Irish cop who has Cahill's number from the word go, and still respects him. Beautifully shot in black-and-white by Seamus Deasy, with a wonderful jazz and rock score adorned by original music from Van Morrison, The General is a funny, terrifying, and strangely lyrical experience for every second of its 129 minutes. The Best-Laid Schemes A Simple Plan    Sam Raimi can do cheap thrills (The Evil Dead, Darkman) in his sleep, but in his new film the director tailors his gift for gothic horror to a character study of near-biblical moral power. In A Simple Plan, nimbly adapted by Scott B. Smith from his novel, Bill Paxton plays Hank Mitchell, an upstanding small-town midwesterner who, with his chronically unemployed older brother, Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob's pal Lou (Brent Briscoe), happens upon $4 million in a snow-covered crashed plane. With a pretty wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda), and a baby on the way, Hank has every reason to stay clean. From the moment the other two men talk Hank into keeping the money, all three become ensnared in a tragicomedy of bungled choices and unintended consequences that threaten to shatter their lives. Raimi knows exactly when to pull out the stops (crows pecking at dead human eyes) and when to shock by suggestion (when a man kills for the first time, we see only his face, screwed up in distaste). Paxton conveys a blend of vulnerability and steely resolve that's at once haunting and funny. Thornton, who overdid his simpleton role in Sling Blade, is here wonderfully abject as a slovenly lout whose capacity for ethical discrimination develops just too late to save himself and those he loves. A quiet film whose eerie loveliness is emphasized by Danny Elfman's ominous score, A Simple Plan elaborates with subtle intelligence the principle that given sufficient bait, even -- perhaps especially -- the most ostentatiously clean-living among us are capable of moral equivocation and betrayal. Idle Chatter    Sean Penn in    Hurlyburly Once a year at least, Hollywood dispenses a confessional movie (the price the movie industry pays for continuing to be bad), flagellating its own for their venality, decadence, and amoral self-regard. The latest is Hurlyburly, adapted by David Rabe from his stage play and directed by Anthony Drazan (Zebrahead). Set in the Hollywood hills, home to the anxiously hip second tier of entertainment executives and also-ran celebrities, the movie opens with an obligatory round of sex, cocaine, and bad weather. The rest is talk -- cell-phone talk, talk while taking meetings, talk while doing endless lines of coke, talk while humiliating women, talk even while mourning a friend's death -- among four male friends tortured by failures of love and career and by the absence of meaning in their lives. Would that we had something to look at while all this chat was going on, other than the shiny, featureless surfaces of the supermodern hillside home shared by Eddie (Sean Penn) and his bleached-blond associate Mickey (Kevin Spacey), and frequently visited by Phil (Chazz Palminteri), an unemployed actor, and Artie (Garry Shandling), a slick Hollywood player. Despite its excellent cast (Meg Ryan plays shrewdly against type as a tough but downtrodden stripper), Hurlyburly offers little more than cleverly constructed dialogue among a bunch of callow narcissists bent on self-destruction. When Eddie finds redemption, incongruously wrapped in the words of an underaged waif (Anna Paquin) he has earlier ravished within moments of their meeting, his enlightenment seems both false and pat. Who can sympathize with a man who can't stop blathering long enough for a moment's reflection? Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly. Go to ... Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.