‘Garp’ finally comes to town

Press, 1 November 1984, Page 10

‘Garp’ finally comes to town

After a delay of almost two years, the eagerly awaited film, “The World According to Garp’’ will finally start at the Westend tomorrow. According to John Irving, author of the novel on which the film is based, T. S. Garp was conceived during a brief tryst between Jenny Fields, a resolute young nurse, and Technical Sergeant Garp, a mortally wounded tail gunner whose libido threatened to outlive the rest of him. Lust, Jenny would later insist, had nothing to do with it. She wanted a child. And if it had been possible to bear one without the muss and bother of sex, she would gladly have done so. “The World According to Garp” stars Robin Williams in the title role, Mary Beth Hurt as his wife, Helen, Glenn Close as Nurse Jenny Fields, and John Lithgow as Roberta Muldoon, former tight end of the Philadelphia Eagles. Like the book, the film begins at the Steering Prep School for Boys, an elitist academy where Jenny Fields has taken up residence — as the school nurse — to pay for her son’s education. There, Garp discovers an enthusiasm for writing, wrestling and Helen Holm, his wrestling coach’s bookish daughter. He also learns that dangling from a broken drainpipe is more dangerous than dangling a participle, that lust (like fiction) requires careful plotting, and that the biblical edict, “an eye for an eye,” is equally apt where applied to the ear of an ill-tempered dog.

Emerging from school, he sets out to become a serious writer, championed by Helen and inspired by images of a suicidal lover, a plummeting piano and a pair of magic gloves.

But his carerr is surpassed by his mother’s first and only literary effort, an autobiography entitled “A Sexual Suspect,” which triggers a rabidly violent feminist crusade. He befriends Roberta Muldoon, the erstwhile football champion, now grappling with his/her own newfound femininity.

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