_Restoration_ Wigs. There are lots of them in Michael Hampton's movie, and most of them look rather alike. They're dark, sensual, arranged to tumble down in blankets of lush curls. They look heavy, but so does everything else they're wearing in _Restoration_'s England circa 1660s, the capes, the jewelry, the shoulderpads. The wigs are strking, in part because you're seeing stars like Robert Downey, Jr. and Sam Neill wear them, in part because they take up so much screen space in the widescreen closeups. They're at least as impressive as the costumes, sets, and squads of dogs that surround royal court members (and instigate key plot turns). And they serve as emblems of decadence-on-the-way-to-corruption, the kind of drama for which the period is renowned, while they're also signs of cultivation and civilization, King Charles II's response to Puritanical repressiveness. The wigs would also seem to dress up the film's prosaic plot: ordinary guy, pressed into extraordinary circumstances, finds redemption for his various ethical and spiritual failings. Robert Merivel (Downey) isn't absolutely an ordinary guy - he's a talented doctor who only needs to find his calling - but he functions as such, being determined to abuse himself and others (through too much drinking, sex, and general depravity, signalled by the fact that he's repeatedly rearranging the wig that's barely fixed on his head). He has adventures, a best friend, a child, some deaths in his immediate family... even in period drag, this movie resembles warmed over Forrest Gump<>. Robert isn't the innocent child-man that Forrest was, of course (he's pretty much an asshole, self-squandering and short-sighted, sort of the consummate stereotypical Restoration figure), but the movie does lean heavily on the little-guy-afloat-in-the-storm-of-history device. You can see how it's appealing, in that you can achieve an epic feel, without actually going to epic extremes. The film's timeline only covers a few years - opening in 1663 London, working through the Bubonic Plague in 1665 and concluding with the Great Fire in 1666 - but it achieves an episodic rhythm anyway, with a protagonist whose function is to react. In Robert's case, reacting includes some highly conspicuous consumption and, eventually, some sobering ethical education. He's introduced as an up and coming medical student at school with his buddy John Pearce (David Thewlis), who tends not to wear a wig, suggesting that he's a nobler sort. They share what appears to be a singular and life-shaping experience (at least it occupies the center of the film's judgments about Merivel and the choices he goes on to make): they meet an old man who has a gaping hole in his chest, through which his beating heart is visible. Robert reaches in and touches the heart, a gesture that conveys his talent and courage. At least it moves Pearce (who never gets over his own failure to do the same thing), and the King (Neill), who proceeds to audition and hire Merivel as court doctor. Robert's acceptance of the position amounts to selling out, as he then immerses himself in the many indulgences allowed by class privilege. Instead of making conscientious use of his new rank and the King's good will toward things scientific, he wastes his time and talent. Acting like an idiot, cavorting as "King of the Wind'' (he farts on cue, which delights the many beautiful women he will soon be bedding) and drinking himself into repeated stupors, Robert earns the King's appreciation. He's asked to marry one of the Royal Mistresses, Lady Celia (Polly Walker), on the condition that he won't try to have sex or romance with her. He's installed at a sumptuous estate, where he's tended by a benevolent chief servant named Gates (Ian McKellan) and bothered by a sniggy portraitist named Finn (Hugh Grant, again). More stuff happens, all underlining the point that Robert's bad character is the film's central concern, with historical events serving as convenient, Gumpish backdrop. It can't be coincidence that his major crisis - of conscience, spirituality, ethics - comes when he meets someone who's wearing a very bad wig. This would be Katherine, played by Meg Ryan, a woman who's been put away in a Quaker Asylum for insane, because she's been acting badly (disoriented, fretful) since her daughter died and her husband left her (she's reminiscent of the "crazy girls'' in The Searchers<>). Actually, Katherine is not wearing a wig, but Ryan is: in order to look like a poverty-stricken person, she wears make-up that looks like it's not make-up, and a wig that looks like it's not a wig (it's blondish, frowsy, and wild, emulating that "natural'' look, the look you get after too much blow-drying or a drive in a convertible). Part of what's interesting about Katherine is that she embodies - to an extent - the movie's contradictory attitude toward the era. Most obviously, her relatively small part in Robert's career looms as his (and Restoration<>'s) moral barometer. Katherine is one of those simple souls who intuitively understands the value of compassion and loyalty, who wears her hair uncurled. She represents a resistance to "progress'' that inevitably means increased anonymity and alienation. (In a way, she gets to be Forrest and Jenny at the same time, but then again, this movie isn't about her, it's about how her example instructs Merivel, in need of inspiration to do the right thing.) But at the same time, Katherine is an obvious victim of the era's will to ignorance, repeatedly, as she's incarcerated, presumed stupid (in part because she's a woman without money), and, we're led to believe, variously abused. Robert's involvement with her (which begins as a kind of abuse, or it would be considered so now - he's her doctor) changes the direction of his life, while adding to the increasing number of plot contrivances leading to his revelation, or rather, his "restoration.'' They rescue each other, though their payoffs are disproportionate. The moral is clear: survival depends on good wigs.