First-time directors get their big chances in different ways; for Chris Terrio, who came to Dallas to discuss “Heights,” his ensemble drama featuring Glenn Close and Jesse Bradford, the opportunity came by a kind of prolonged serendipity. “I had met [the producing-directing team of Ismail] Merchant and [James] Ivory when I was in film school,” he recalled. “And because a lot of my background was in literature [he studied English Literature at Harvard and Cambridge University], when James Ivory needed an assistant on a [Henry James] film called ‘The Golden Bowl,’ they hired me for the summer. My job was like my dream nerd job, because it was, go find an Edith Wharton short story for Uma [Thurman] to read about being a lady in the international society of this period [the nineteenth century]–half a week in the library, half a week on the set–which is, like, a blast. And then I was back in film school, and they had read some things I had written and seen some short films of mine. And then I graduated film school, and I was broke and needed a job, and they offered me the job to do camera on an electronic press kit for a movie called ‘The Divorce.’ So I got to go to Paris and do that. And while I was in Paris, I met Glenn [Close], because we were often the only English speakers who were around, we would talk together even though I was pretty low on the totem pole and she was obviously Glenn Close. And that’s how I met her. Then Merchant-Ivory asked me to direct a staged reading for them for their arts foundation–they did a reading of a screenplay-slash-manuscript by Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley called ‘Jacob’s Hands,’ and I had directed that for them, which seemed to go pretty well, and I got to work with Mia Farrow and Diane Wiest and Sam Waterston, and I think that kind of assured them, ‘Okay, he won’t embarrass us in a room with big actors.’ And this project called ‘Heights’ had been kicking around in various incarnations. They’d bought this one-act play with three characters, and they had the idea that it was basically about a love triangle, but it was just going in all directions. So Ismail said to me as I was on my way to the Deauville Film Festival, he gave me the original version of the script and said, ‘Do you think you could do anything with this?’ So I read it and said yeah, this is a world I know–people in their mid- to late twenties who are trying to establish themselves in the arts in New York–and I want to do it. So he told me I could start working on it, and if I could start to get it off the ground, he would produce it. In other words, I won the lottery!”

In its final form, the screenplay of “Heights” bears very little resemblance to the original play. “There are only about two lines from it in the movie,” Terrio said. “[The play] was the scene in which Jonathan comes up as sees Isabel talking to Alec on the rooftop. Amy [Fox, the playwright] had been given a creative writing exercise–there’s a romantic dinner table set for two, but there are three characters. Now write a scene. So she wrote the triangle that was Alec, Jonathan and Isabel. The script expanded from there, became a day, and all the other characters were added in. Ismail added the character of Diana to the mix because he thought we should explore Isabel’s mother.”

Eventually Glenn Close played Diana, a reigning Broadway diva with an unfaithful husband. “When I got involved in stage two [of the writing], I immediately thought of Glenn, because I had just met her in Paris, and so I began trying to mold some of it toward her. There’s a certain irony and sense of humor that Glenn has that you get when you’re talking to her, but I don’t think you always get in her more fierce parts. I really wanted to get that sotto voce thing. I love ‘Bullets Over Broadway,’ and Diane Wiest is a genius. But I didn’t want this to be that; I felt that this needed to be more textured and more layered. Of course, Glenn is a very different person from Diana, but there are some similarities.”

Bradford, who joined Terrio for the Dallas interview, plays Alec, a young actor who tries out for a part in a Broadway production of “Macbeth” that Diana will be starring in as Lady Macbeth. How did he join the cast? “I got a call from my agent that there was this Merchant-Ivory project, and I had worked with them before, on ‘A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries.’ It came in essentially as an offer. I knew Glenn Close was involved, I knew Jim and Ismail were involved. I was thrilled with the thought of working with all of those people. I think I knew that Elizabeth Banks [Isabel] and James Marsden [Jonathan] were at least options. They were in the mix, and I liked those ideas a lot. And I got the script and remember thinking, opening the first page, I hope this is really good, because everything else seems to be in place. And I loved it.” He added: “My favorite scene to shoot was the audition scene with Glenn,” when Alec has to read in front of Diana. “That’s a scenario I’m pretty damned familiar with,” he added.

Terrio was enthusiastic about what Bradford had brought to his role. “The difficulty with Alec is that he’s so opaque,” he said. “You know you should be interested in him, but you don’t quite know why. And I think it’s to Jesse’s credit that despite the fact that we don’t give a lot away about who Alec is or where he’s coming from, you do invest in him, and I think you do sympathize with him. I think Jesse manages to keep us with him throughout the entire movie, although when you think about it, why should we even care about him? I don’t want to give Jesse an inflated ego, but he manages to convey an interior life for the character that I think is really hard, especially among younger actors. There would be a way to play the character in a much bigger, more theatrical way; but I think Jesse understands the camera and knows how to underplay something in order to be more subtle and more interesting.” To which Bradford said: “I have no additional comment. I think he made me sound pretty good.”

Bradford did talk, however, about how the role differed from the teen parts he’d specialized in until now. “It’s a natural progression, as far as I’m concerned. I was at the right age at the right time to take part in what was kind of a crazy little boom of a style of movie, a type of movie that I was sort of perfect for on some levels. So I reaped the benefits and had a great time doing it, and even in that genre I feel that I picked movies that mattered to me and that I believed in and that I thought were going to be good and that I was behind a hundred percent. Moving right along, my focus in life is no longer the SATs, getting my driver’s license and losing my virginity. (It hasn’t been for quite a while, frankly.) So to try to revisit that world is like retrograde motion, and it feels stupid. This movie and ‘Happy Endings’ were both ideal situations in which…to start dealing with issues that felt more close to home in terms of where I am now. And if it takes a while for casting directors to catch up, that’s their problem.”

C+

The last time H.G. Wells’s famous book was made into a movie, it was called “Signs,” and M. Night Shyamalan, who didn’t advertise the dependence of his updating, eschewed its big canvas in favor of something more intimate, concentrating on a single family’s reaction to the alien invasion. Now Steven Spielberg returns not only to the original title (minus the introductory article)–and to Wells’s basic story arc (the narration intoned by the ubiquitous Morgan Freeman at the beginning and end comes almost directly from the book), though many details are naturally changed and incidents added–but also to the massive scenes of destruction and crowd panic that marked both George Pal’s 1953 adaptation (well directed by the underrated Byron Haskin) and another unacknowledged filmization, Roland Emmerich’s big, dumb 1996 blockbuster “Independence Day.” But he subtracts from both those movies as well as borrowing from them, avoiding Emmerich’s cartoonish sensibility and Haskin’s anti-communist subtext (which he replaces, it must be noted, with an anti-terrorist one); his picture is a somber, serious story about how human civilization can be threatened from outside. And he takes a page from Shyamalan’s notebook, adding a familial element by centering the piece on an absentee father who reunites with his children by protecting them from the invaders. Unfortunately, while “War of the Worlds” certainly succeeds in painting the big picture, it works much less well on the domestic side. Or to put it another way, the movie functions on all cylinders when it sticks to the alien side of things, but its human component is weak.

That’s rather a surprise coming from Spielberg, who’s previously shown considerable skill in balancing the two. Both “Close Encounters” and “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” had really affecting, if highly manipulative, family dramas to accompany the special-effects elements; they had an emotional core to enliven the sci-fi stuff. And even in his early movies that emphasized the mechanical aspects of the craft–“Duel” and “Jaws,” which were, after all, just brilliant Hitchcockian examples of audience manipulation–he took pains to feature characters who might have had a pulplish center but were really engaging.

That’s not really the case here. The director has a field day with the big sequences: the lightning storm that presages the initial attack is expertly staged and scored (although there’s surely an overabundance of sheets hung out to dry in the backyards of the working-class New Jersey neighborhood, merely to show us all the cloth flapping madly in the wind), and the first emergence of an alien attack vessel from beneath a city street, ripping the concrete apart in the process, is a great set-piece (even if the following shots of the hero running away while people and real estate are pulverized just behind him aren’t much more impressive than the rear-projection efforts familiar for fifty years). The later sequences of the so-called Tripods lumbering across the landscape, making what sound like hydraulic noises and occasionally emitting a fog-horn-like signal, are impressive, particularly as they’re photographed by ace cinematographer Janusz Kaminski in a grim, murky, smoke-filled style that gives them a haunting quality. (Here one feels in the visual design a curious cross between Pal’s sleeker flying ships and the clanking machine of Kurt Neumann’s rather wacky 1957 “Kronos.”) John Williams’ pulsating score enhances the atmosphere at these moments, too. And Spielberg is predictably at his best in the scenes where the aliens almost stumble upon the hiding humans–one in which a bunch of them amble around a basement, apparently just exploring, and even more in the inevitable sequence when the invaders’ snakelike periscope slithers around the same place, always just missing our heroes by inches. (Again, Williams’ music adds to the tension.)

But while one can admire the dexterity with which all the commotion and hide-and-seek are choreographed, the fact remains that the family members who serve as the audience surrogates never generate the emotional pull they need to make us care about the story (as opposed to appreciating the parade of visuals). Maybe that’s because Spielberg is once more paired with Tom Cruise, whose macho posturing and clench-jawed intensity don’t fit with the kind of slightly frumpy, seemingly ineffectual protagonist Spielberg’s always worked best with (remember that even in “Jaws,” Robert Shaw played second fiddle to Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss). “Minority Report,” their earlier joint effort, was more notable for its surface virtuosity than anything else, and the same is true here. It doesn’t help that Cruise’s character Cruise–divorced dock worker Ray Ferrier, who’s stuck with his kids Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin) on the weekend the invasion occurs–is sort of a self-centered jerk whose growing devotion to his children never really convinces. (Nor do the unique abilities the Josh Friedman-David Koepp script endows Ray with. Apparently’s he’s the only civilian who realizes how to get a car started again after the alien energy bursts immobilize them, apart from the TV news van that’s still conveniently running and all the military vehicles that are apparently unaffected; and later on he alone not only proves able to bring one of the Tripods down from the inside after being captured by the aliens but is also the first to notice that the alien force-field shielding their machines from bombardment has gone down.) But even within the limitations of the writing, Cruise’s performance never gets much below the surface. And the children aren’t any better. Fanning is as mannered as ever; she comes across as a stiff, porcelain figure whose main contribution to the proceedings is a piercing shriek that occurs with distressing frequency. Chatwin sulks decently as the rebellious Robbie, but he’s hamstrung by the one-note nature of the part. The only other cast members of consequence are Miranda Otto, as Ray’s beatifically pregnant ex-wife, and Tim Robbins, usually a subtle and refined actor, who under Spielberg’s curiously heavy-handed direction chews the scenery mercilessly as Ogilvy (the name comes from the book, too), an oddball who gives Ray and Rachel shelter in his cellar. (He does, however, get to declaim a line which, in real-life, he might, as an anti-Bush activist, agree with. “Occupations always fail,” Ogilvy says.)

The picture’s failure to bring its lead characters fully to life is repeated on the larger canvas as well. There’s an oddly misogynist tone to its overall depiction of humankind, most notably in a scene in which the Ferrier family is attacked in their van by a mob of crazed refugees and another involving a ferry (giving Spielberg an opportunity for another set-piece, “Titanic”-style this time). The absence of any real nobility in the admittedly grim circumstances (a problem that certainly didn’t afflict “Schindler’s List,” set in a similarly appalling situation)–with Ray’s final encounter with Ogilvy being perhaps the most savage example–leaves this “War” a curiously bloodless affair, despite all the carnage. It also makes the concluding “happy” ending in Boston seem unearned (as well as, quite frankly, unlikely from a practical perspective). But then, family and personal redemption must, one supposes, be celebrated at all cost, even the sacrifice of plausibility.

The verdict? This anti-“Close Encounters” is a spectacular technical exercise, but in the final analysis it’s as loud and soulless a piece of equipment as the aliens’ Tripod Death Stars.