MOVIE REVIEW : ‘See the Paradise’--See the Passion, Hear the Flaws : Alan Parker the director creates a charged atmosphere in his drama of the Japanese-American internment camps, but Parker the screenwriter loses his way.

The 100,000 Japanese Americans interned in American detention camps for most of World War II weren’t as unlucky as the Jews of Eastern Europe. They didn’t die for the crime of being different. They simply lost their rights, their status as citizens, their dignity. And, in “Come See the Paradise” (opening Friday throughout San Diego County), writer-director Alan Parker’s brave but flawed drama about the period, they lose something else as well: their palpability as human beings.

Two sensibilities seem at war with each other in “Paradise.” Parker the director--with his high gift for melodrama, his energy, ambition and guts--fills the movie with his own rage against injustice, with color, strength, movement, and a vivid panorama of the past.

But Parker the writer seems bent on sabotaging his director at every opportunity. He loads the dialogue with bald exposition, sermons and cliches. He jams together two separate plots--an interracial love story and the drama of the camp internment--and leaves all the seams showing; sometimes the stories seem only dimly connected. Parker the director deserves all our praise and sympathy. Parker the writer lets his boss down badly.

“Come See the Paradise” is a highly emotional drama without real emotion, though certainly, its subject--the frustrations of an interracial love affair and marriage, the persecution of a minority, the dissolution of a family--ought to wring out tears and anger. It’s told in flashback by a Japanese-American woman, Lily Kamamura McGurn (Tamlyn Tomita), as she and her young daughter, Mini, walk to the station to meet a train bringing Mini’s Caucasian father, Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid).

The narration is peculiar, though Tomita delivers it prettily. Early on, you may wonder why Lily tells Mini more stories about Jack’s activities than her own, or why her memories continually assume Jack’s point of view or why, at one point, she carefully describes to Mini a scene at which she wasn’t present but Mini was--a Christmas episode with an obnoxious, racist store Santa. And you may be dumbfounded when Lily tells Mini things that took place only several years ago. Has this 12-year-old girl suffered an attack of amnesia? Do they never talk except at railway stations?

Lily’s penchant for metaphor is equally bizarre. Reflecting on her father’s deterioration and the malaise of the internees, she says wistfully, “It’s a beautiful country, if only you have eyes to see it. But suddenly we felt like blind men, peeping through a fence . . . . “ These blind men, peeping, for some curious reason, through a fence, symbolize the problems writer Parker persistently gives director Parker.

The physical look of the movie often seems right, but the emotional tone is almost always helter-skelter. The young Japanese all have a casually hip tone. They’re like Keye Luke or Victor Sen Yung in ‘30s Chinese roles: over-Americanized hepcats. Their propensity for open profanity and frank sexual badinage seems drastically out of place here, more suitable to the ‘60s than the ‘40s.

This is a film--with its broad social canvas, controversial subject, and vividly detailed re-creations of a past era--that can’t have been an easy one to make. And there’s something rather sad about the way the script falls apart, because director Parker handles the material so vigorously, and his regular cinematographer, Michael Seresin, keeps the images so sharp and lyrical, and the film is acted and made with such obvious energy and devotion, that a different writer might have helped Parker to a little classic.

Yet the breach is never healed, the sensibilities never mesh. Director Parker keeps breaking down barriers, striking out audaciously. Meanwhile, writer Parker, perhaps, is staring blindly, though a fence.

‘Come See the Paradise’

Dennis Quaid: Jack McGurn

Tamlyn Tomita: Lily Kawamura

Sab Shimono: Mr. Kawamura

Shizuko Hoshi: Mrs. Kawamura

A Twentieth Century Fox presentation. Director/writer Alan Parker. Producer Robert Colesberry. Cinematographer Michael Seresin. Editor Gerry Hambling. Costumes Molly Maginnis. Music Randy Edelman. Production design Geoffrey Kirkland. Art director John Willett. Set decorator Jim Erickson. Sound Danny Michael. With Stran Egi, Ronald Yamamoto. Running time: 2 hours, 21 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (sex, language, some violence).