Comfort of Strangers, The

A very strange psychosexual melodrama from director Paul Schrader and screenwriter Harold Pinter, "The Comfort of Strangers" is bizarre and unsettling, yet strangely mesmerizing. Unfortunately, it's also intermittently dull and, in the end, unsatisfying.

That has something to do with the distance between the characters and the audience, a gap that is never quite bridged. And although distance is part of what the film is about, it's hard for offish, aimless characters to engender audience sympathy. And that's what we have here.

The first third or so of the film chronicles the bland, stuffy relationship of a young English couple (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett) on vacation in Venice.

They aren't married (Richardson has children from an earlier marriage) but have been together for four years. They are in Venice because that's where they spent their first holiday together, when they were passionately in love four years earlier. It's apparent that they still love each other and would like to rekindle their stalled relationship, but neither seems to have the energy.

Meanwhile, as they stroll the streets that line the canals, someone seems to be taking photographs of them, and every now and then a mysterious figure in a white suit appears to be lurking in the background.

Eventually, we learn that the man in the white suit is unctuous Christopher Walken, in a role tailor-made for his spooky demeanor and weird line readings. One night when Richardson and Everett are lost in the alleyways, looking for a restaurant, Walken comes out of nowhere to take them into an odd little bar where he relates bizarre stories about youth and his harsh, old-fashioned, ridiculously strict father.

Later, they also meet Walken's physically stiff, overly solicitous wife (Helen Mirren), who seems even crazier than Walken. It's apparent that Walken and Mirren want too desperately to be friends with them, and the obsessive behavior they exhibit is a bit frightening. So Richardson and Everett are wary from the start . . . yet they also can't help but be fascinated by them in some strange way.

And so it is with this movie.