Less an adaptation than a transplantation, this filmed version of Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner stars Mike Nichols (in his first film role) and Miranda Richardson as a married couple in an unnamed place and time who see the world around them begin to change drastically. Speaking to the camera, or to unseen interrogators, in interlocking monologues, Nichols, Richardson, and Richardson's father (David De Keyser), a respected man of letters, recount their experiences before, during, and following a violent underclass revolt that systematically eliminates members of the cultured, intellectual ruling class. This sort of thing has happened in China, Russia, and elsewhere, but it's not a real revolution that Shawn's play has in mind. De Keyser is among those targeted, despite once having written a sensitive essay pitying the unprivileged, but Nichols responds with considerably greater ambiguity, having always been, he later confesses, "a lowbrow at heart." The nightmare of a dozing Harper's reader, Mourner is less about an actual revolution than the perceived disappearance of a recognizable high culture. Shawn's alarm at the ebbing of the ranks who recognize the greatness of John Donne, and all Donne represents, is probably more legitimate than many would admit, but he paints his picture in strokes so broad that he appears less like a designated mourner for passing cultivation than a shrill paranoiac: If Donne could exist alongside bear-baiting, he surely can survive WWF Smackdown. David Hare, who also directed the acclaimed stage version, does a decent job staging his talking heads in a manner that's more cinematic than might be expected, and the performances, particularly Nichols', are superb. But Shawn's play has no ring of truth. That it perhaps intentionally lumps those who don't like it in with the lowbrows only works against Shawn's argument: Better to be engagingly lowbrow than to be in thrall to an icy, inhuman, false sense of good taste.