'Bridge of San Luis Rey' collapses under script's dead weight

It's been a while since a well-heeled movie has botched a classic novel as badly as the new version of "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," which has been dropped into the summer lineup out of absolutely nowhere with an all-star cast and surprisingly good production values.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY

DIRECTOR: Mary McGuckian

CAST: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Gabriel Byrne, Kathy Bates, F. Murray Abraham, Geraldine Chaplin

RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes

RATING: PG for thematic elements, some disturbing images and some sensuality

GRADE: D

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The 1927 Thornton Wilder novel has been filmed twice before: a 1928 MGM version that won the second Oscar ever awarded for interior decoration; and a lower-budget 1944 version that was the next-to-last film of the legendary Alla Nazimova.

And it has an irresistibly intriguing storyline: Set in 18th-century colonial Peru, it tells the multiple stories of five people whose sad fate it was to be crossing a rope suspension bridge over a high river canyon when it happened to collapse, sending them to their deaths.

The stories are seen in flashback from the point of view of a priest (Gabriel Byrne), who spent six years researching the victims and, for his trouble, is now being tried for heresy in an inquisitional court headed by the archbishop of Lima (Robert De Niro).

What the priest was seeking was a divine purpose behind the accident -- either goodness in the characters that might inspire God to "take them early" or evil that God was out to punish. If the accident was mere chance, how can he believe that God guides the universe?

It's a killer of a theological question, and to ask it this latest film version employs a cast of Oscar winners, some bold camerawork (by Javier Aguirresarobe, who shot "The Others") and consistently imaginative art direction (by multi-Oscar-winner Gil Parrondo).

But the script and direction by Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian is just deadly. She never hooks us into the story, her scenes are so rambling and dull we never quite know what's going on, and her overall lack of basic storytelling skill is appalling.

Her script does slavishly adhere to the novel, but that's not a virtue in this case. It's terminally talky -- dialogue conveys everything -- and when we get Wilder's flashing-light message at the end, it doesn't follow from anything we've seen or felt.

None of the performances work -- even that of Bryne, who has a great face from another century and comes closest -- and the reunion of the "Mean Streets" team of De Niro and Harvey Keitel particularly fizzles. Each seems stiff, awkward and anachronistic in period togs.

The film is such a disaster that it brings up the question: with so many seasoned but out-of-work directors around who could have given coherence to this story, what made the producers go with an unknown young filmmaker with apparently no affinity for the material?