PASSION FISH (Directed by John Sayles. Starring Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, Leo Burmester, Vondle Curtis-Hall, David Strathairn)

Mary McDonnell plays a soap opera star who is knocked down by a New York taxi on her way to get her legs waxed and winds up bitterly paraplegic, drinking heavily and snapping at everyone from the safety of her wheelchair. Which is exactly the kind of thing that happens in soap operas, as writer director John Sayles (Brother From Another Planet, Eight Men Out, City Of Hope - to name but a few) is well aware. Transplanting this event to an approximation of the real world, his film traces her emotional recovery and uneasy alliance with a black nurse/companion (Alfre Woodard) in the beautiful Bayou countryside.

While ironically lampooning soap operatic conventions, it appears this most vital and intelligent of directors has merely traded one set of clichés for another. Passion Fish develops into a predictable variation on the women bonding in the deep South movie, with a kind of Pushing Miss Daisy thrown in for good measure. Sayles was PC when we still thought that meant Personal Computer, and he touches on all the expected issues (disablement, feminism, racism) with a few more thrown in for good measure (there is a delightfully sympathetic homosexual character). Deliberately touching and ultimately upbeat, this is about as close to the mainstream as Sayles is likely to get.

What raises Passion Fish above the mundane is, as usual with Sayles, the quality of the writing and acting. His dialogue is so witty and intelligent it is able to deal with the issues thrown up without actually confronting them head on, and his actresses rise (or, in Mary McDonnell's case, sit) to the occasion with performances of subtlety and nuance. And while he exploits enough of the genre conventions to make this his most sentimental movie to date, he cannot quite surrender to all the demands of feel good cinema, keeping a thread of unease present to the end.

But it is an end that is a long way coming. At 135 minutes, some may feel the subtle pleasures of Passion Fish could do with an occasional injection of soap operatic plot development. I for one kept secretly wishing McDonnell's wheelchair would go out of control and roll in front of the local silage truck. To paraphrase Tom Hanks for the second time this issue, it's a chick's movie.