Regarding Henry

Mike Nichols' "Regarding Henry" opens with a portrait of a Manhattan lawyer as a driven, ambitious man who lives in great wealth and little happiness. Then a catastrophe occurs. He steps out one night to buy some cigarettes, and is shot in a holdup. One of the bullets penetrates his brain, and for weeks he drifts in a coma, until finally he awakens and the long process of rehabilitation can begin.

The movie is essentially about how Henry becomes more lovable and human as a result of his injury - how his soul is healed and his family saved by the experience. The shock of the bullet to his brain is diminished for the audience because all of the advertising for this movie, including the trailers and the TV commercials, spoil the surprise. But the movie isn't really about the gunshot wound, anyway.

It's about how a man becomes a child, and the change is for the better.

The original Henry is played by Harrison Ford as a taciturn taskmaster who treats his young daughter as if she were a balky client and his wife (Annette Bening) as a partner with whom he is friendly but not intimate. After the grievous wound to his brain, Henry recovers into an altogether more pleasant person. He can remember almost nothing of his previous life, to be sure, and has to take it on trust that he has this wife and daughter. But with the directness of a child he values honesty and loyalty, two qualities the old Henry was not familiar with.

There is possibly a good movie to be found somewhere within this story, but Mike Nichols has not found it in "Regarding Henry." This is a film of obvious and shallow contrivance, which aims without apology for easy emotional payoffs, and tries to manipulate the audience with plot twists that belong in a sitcom.

Genuine issues - such as the family's economic insecurity and the wife's reaction to the end of her days in a gilded cage - are glossed over. But there is time for a soap opera subplot about office affairs, and lots of time for Henry to confront the dishonesty in his old law firm.

For much of the film, Henry is an attractive, likeable, simple-minded and childlike character. But exactly how simple-minded? The movie seems to treat his mental acuity as a matter of convenience; he is childlike enough to say embarrassing things in public, but clever enough to know what's really going on, and to outsmart his old law colleagues. A pattern emerges: We begin to notice, after awhile, that in any given scene Henry will possess the necessary mental development to deliver the punch line. He isn't a character, he's an act.