`WATERLAND' IS A SAD TALE WITH A SENSE OF HISTORY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 23, 1993                   TAG: 9301230237
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`WATERLAND' IS A SAD TALE WITH A SENSE OF HISTORY
At the end of "Waterland," Tom Crick tells a school assembly the reason he became a history teacher. Crick was in Germany during World War II and saw horrible things there. The only way he could cope was to place the carnage in the context of history and give it a story.
And so it is with his own life. Crick, played with a precisely pitched gravity by Jeremy Irons, is a history teacher in Pittsburgh. He and his wife, Mary, played by Irons' real-life wife, Sinead Cusack, share a deeply traumatic past.
They grew up on the fens of East Anglia in England, a lonely place of stark beauty that has been reclaimed from the sea.
Tom lived with his father and his mentally retarded brother near a canal. He and Mary were schoolmates and lovers swept away by their lust for each other. Little did they anticipate the terrible consequences of their awakening sexuality.
Those consequences are told by Crick to his high school history class in response to a student who is dubious about the value of history. Crick, who is on an emotional edge, may think he's bringing history alive through the example of his own past. But he's actually administering therapy to himself, as the skeptical student, played by Ethan Hawke, points out.
"Waterland" is an engrossing and hauntingly sad tale that exists on several planes.
Crick's life in Pittsburgh seems separated not by decades but by centuries from the windswept fens and a Gothic past that includes incest, madness and murder.
Director Steven Gyllenhall takes several risks in his stylistic approach to the story. During one part of the movie, Crick seems to lead his class on a student tour of his family's past. By all rights, such flourishes shouldn't work, but they do. Part of the reason is due to the director's lyrical style and part of it is due to the first-rate cast.
Irons brings a battered integrity to the role of the mild-mannered teacher. Cusack is more fierce and closer to the emotional edge. Hawke provides a rebellious, all-American contrast to the emotionally fragile and very British history teacher.
Grant Warnock, as the young Tom, intelligently handles the role of an adolescent buffeted by forces he doesn't intend to unleash. And Lena Headey is riveting as the sexually adventurous and mysterious young Mary.
\ Waterland: *** Showing at The Grandin Theatre (345-6177). Rated R for language and sexual content; 99 minutes.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB