[Inaugurating a new series about movies that are not currently available on home video, and why this sucks.]

Patty Hearst wasn't Natasha Richardson's first movie, but it did mark the first time that the then-twenty-five-year-old actress had the lead role in a feature film. It also marked the first time that she was asked to pass for American, an ability that can make or break an English performer who hopes to make it in the international marketplace. In fact, she was asked to pass for an actual American, in a film based on Hearst's own account of her 1974 abduction by the crackpot "revolutionary" group the SLA and that event's aftermath--a film that Hearst herself, who posed for publicity photos with her movie doppelganger, had some input on. But no pressure! The director Paul Schrader made the movie on a tight budget at a time when he was coming off some expensive failures; much of the first half is set in the house where Hearst was kept prisoner. In fact, because of Schrader's decision to tell the story from Hearst's point of view, a fair amount of it is set in the dark closet where she was locked until she began parroting the SLA members' slogans and convinced them that she was ready to switch sides and become a guerrilla soldier. The strategy means that Richardson has to not just carry the picture but to supply its heart and soul, while remaining essentially mysterious to the audience: as Patty goes from being helpless, whimpering victim to fugitive from justice, you stare at her, trying to figure out where her head is at. It isn't until the end, when she's behind bars and plotting out how best to spin her story, that it's fully clear that, up to that point, she hasn't really known herself.

For a guy who's had his name on some movies that have made direct contact with audiences in remarkable ways, Paul Schrader, as a director, does not have the most ingratiating style. His films have a tendency to be coldly cerebral and, given his taste in subject matter, are often downright unpleasant. But his charmless, rigorous approach can yield major dividends when he has the right story to tell, and when he has actors who can supply a human core to his theme-dissertation filmmaking. Like David Fincher's Zodiac, Patty Hearst deglamorizes sociopathic behavior by showing the sociopaths as they really look, not as they might in the movie that's playing in their heads. The SLA we see here consists of a bunch of phlegmatic middle-class idiots under the sway of a incompetent, petty career criminal--Ving Rhames as ""Field Marshal Cinque"--who thinks he's a revolutionary prophet and who does his best to convince other people to see him that way by talking like Ming the Merciless. They're patently silly, but they aren't just silly to the terrified college girl over whom they hold the power of life and death. (Patty, in between listening to the SLA assure her that she's a pig and that they'd like nothing better than to kill her, is subjected to multiple rape; the men, and the women too, of the SLA seem to think that raping a rich girl constitutes a bold political act.)

Richardson isn't the only person onscreen keeping the movie alive and jumping. Rhames does an amazing job, and the zoo under his command includes Dana Delany, Frances Fisher, and William Forsythe as Bill Harris, the Ned Flanders of armed revolution. Forsythe, an actor who has spent most of his career playing rednecks, thugs, or both--he made Patty Hearst a year after his breakout movie role as John Goodman's baby brother in Raising Arizona--pulled off a major stretch as the pasty jackass Harris, who enjoys babbling about how much he wishes he were black so he could really be down with the street; it may be the best performance of his career. Richardson gives the movie the warmth that is often missing from Paul Schrader's work, but it's warmth with nails in it; Patty turns especially spiky after she's seen the lawmen she's been waiting to come to her rescue pouring bullets into a burning house they think she's in, and after her arrest and conviction, when Richardson's Patty calmly talks about her plans to tell her story and get public opinion on her side--plans that, of course, reached their fruition with her book and with the movie from which it was made. That scene sums up what Schrader himself brings to a project; he has the unsentimental intelligence to see that both his movie and Hearst herself would benefit from being honest enough to acknowledge their role in the larger story of Patty Hearst and the SLA, and though Hearst herself originally objected to the scene, Schrader says that she later saw that he was right about it. By a fairly sick coincidence, in the same week that we lost this movie's star, Sara Jane Olson, who joined the SLA after the Hearst abduction, was released from prison. If she can get a release, Patty Hearst definitely deserves one.