Short fiction is, in many ways, more amenable to being adapted for film than its long-form counterpart. In place of the laborious, often doomed process of paring down a novel's worth of characters and plot comes the pleasure of filling in spaces and luxuriating in nuance. The late John Huston wheezed wonderful life into "The Dead," James Joyce's closer from Dubliners. Anthony Pelissier wrote and directed a perfectly realized adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse Winner." And, lest we forget, Rob Reiner's enchanting Stand by Me and Blake Edwards's also enchanting Breakfast at Tiffany's were forged of novellas by, respectively, Stephen King and Truman Capote.

"There is no end of Abbotts in the world."

Anticipation is high, then, for Inventing the Abbotts, due from 20th Century Fox early next year. The source material is Sue Miller's (she also wrote the acclaimed The Good Mother) trenchant, sparely written story of the same title, concerning two ambitious but modestly born brothers, Jacey and Doug, and their tortuous entanglements with the wealthy prizes of their small, postwar midwestern town: the three comely Abbott sisters, Alice, Eleanor, and Pamela. Prowling territory vaguely similar to that of Jules Feiffer's Carnal Knowledge and John Jay Osborn Jr.'s The Paper Chase, Miller invites us into the endlessly visitable world of white, upper-middle-class psychosexual intrigue, of Shetland sweaters and autumnal Ivy League campuses. The director, Circle of Friends's Pat O'Connor, should be in his element, as should the attractive young cast: Billy Crudup and Joaquin Phoenix as the brothers, and Joanna Going, Jennifer Connelly, and the ascendant Liv Tyler as the Abbott girls. "There is no end of Abbotts in the world, if that's what you need," says the boys' sage mother at one point in the story. What we need, actually, are more writers like Miller, and small movies like this one. □

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