‘Six Degrees of Separation’

Watching Fred Schepisi’s effective 1993 filming of the John Guare play is a bewildering experience--but bewilderment is the appropriate response to what Guare and Schepisi give you. What seems to start out as a burlesque against the rich--a satire of class-consciousness--ends up mutating into something stranger and richer and much more ambiguous. Art dealers Louisa (Stockard Channing) and Flanders Kittredge (Donald Sutherland) are white East Side elites who live out their tony lives with an anxiety-riddled grace. They rotate inside the galaxies of the super-rich, but they’re hand-to-mouth wealthy: They need the constant influx of cash that a really big sale brings. Suddenly, they’re confronted by a young black man (Will Smith) who claims to be friends with their children at Harvard. Bleeding from a stab wound he says he received from a mugging in Central Park, he goes on to reveal that he is the son of Sidney Poitier (Showtime Friday at 8 p.m.).