ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 3, 1996 TAG: 9602040007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
Robert Downey Jr. is a pretty funny guy.
Those few of us who saw the 1991 comedy "Soapdish" won't soon forget his deliciously deceitful television producer, snapping his fingers at a swirling entourage desperate to anticipate his every whim.
Luckily, there's just enough comic space in the first half of Downey's new movie, "Restoration," to let him do a little bit of his wide-eyed "Aren't I a pig?" antics.
But this is a movie that aspires to be about a man's restoration to himself and maybe even to a higher power, and that's where Downey - whose very physical nature is at odds with straight drama - has little choice but to take the pratfalls. He does it with a clown's grace.
Downey plays a gifted physician named Robert Merivel, laboring in the darkness and confusion of Royal College Hospital in London. The year is 1663 and Charles II - the "Merry Monarch" - has come to power.
Merivel is working hard and debauching all over town, but feeling frustrated by medicine's ignorance when he is called to see a man who has lost a good part of his chest in an accident. The man - wide awake and lucid - invites Merivel to touch his exposed heart. Merivel summons up the courage and obviously is moved by the experience - as is the King (Sam Neill), who happens to be watching from a dark corner (lots of lurking monarchs in those days).
The king decides Merivel is just the man to cure one of his ailing dogs, which the lucky physician does, much to even his own surprise. He wins a position at court, shows himself to be an unrepentant, drunken fool, and is chosen to be the "paper groom" of the king's favorite mistress, the wildly beautiful Celia (Polly Walker).
Merivel is set up at his own palace in Suffolk. Unfortunately, he has fallen in love with Celia. Trouble follows trouble, and the anti-hero's odyssey begins. You got your plague, you got your burning of London, you got your plot improbabilities.
Downey is never totally convincing as the boy who becomes a man, but this is still a pretty entertaining enterprise - with special thanks to Hugh Grant, who is remarkably funny as a conniving painter.
"Restoration" is an old-fashioned Hollywood movie with an old-fashioned star who knows not to let the wrong role trip him up - but to fall first and make it look like part of the plan.
Restoration
***
A Miramax release showing at The Grandin Theatre.113 min. Rated R for "excresence" and lots of rollicking sex.
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Robert Downey Jr. plays Robert Merivel, a doctor in theby CNBcourt of England's King Charles II, in ``Restoration.'' color.