C
This movie, which is about a series of reunions involving seven women friends at a summer home, has an interesting genesis: Director-producer Linda Yellen created basic plot points and characters, then handed the skeleton script over to a terrific cast of actresses—Lindsay Crouse, Jill Eikenberry, Martha Plimpton, Ally Sheedy, Talia Shire, Helen Slater, JoBeth Williams—and let them slowly flesh it out with improvisation. They were encouraged, as the press material put it, to "infuse their characters with their own hopes, fears and frustrations."
The result suggests that the actresses were allowed more psycho-rope than they needed. Chantilly Lace plays like Same Time, Next Year staged in group therapy. You get scene after scene of confronting, confessing, sobbing, laughing through drying tears and, finally, bonding. It's hard not to be touched by the sight of these women crying cathartic oceans of tears. Crouse, in particular, is a mighty, gusty, impassioned weeper. She should be kept on call for occasions of national mourning. But therapy isn't drama. I hope the actresses felt better about themselves when the cameras stopped rolling. (If you want to see improvisational drama done right, rent Life Is Sweet, High Hopes or Nuts in May, comedy-dramas directed by Britain's Mike Leigh.)
Disney Channel (Sun., July 18, 7 p.m. ET)
B+
In the title role of this four-hour adaptation of the children's classic, 10-year-old Noley Thornton is especially good at looking hurt and puzzled. Her Heidi seems always to be standing back and sizing up the situation—which, in terms of pop psychology, is what you would expect of an orphan who tends to get stuck in codependent relationships, first with her emotionally distant grandfather (Jason Robards), then as companion to the rich, clinging little invalid Klara (Lexi Randall). Still, Heidi is supposed to be a beam of sunshine, illuminating others' lives with her indomitable happiness, not an emotional victim.
But so what! The story is practically indestructible, and Heidi's final homecoming to Grandpa, with the Alps looming in the background, is still irresistible. The whole final hour, in fact, is first-rate (best scene: Heidi almost goes over the side of a cliff), and the supporting cast is always interesting. Jane Seymour is Klara's pinched, panicky governess, and Patricia Neal is a wise old blind woman of the mountain.
Four hours may be a more leisurely pace than Heidi, which concludes Monday night, needs. It does give you time, however, to wonder whether the women's braids could have been improved with a Topsy Tail.
TNT (Sun., July 18, 8 p.m. ET)
B+
Strike No. 1: The title is portentous. Strike No. 2: The subject is the life of Alexander Graham Bell, which has already been served up in the 1939 Don Ameche movie The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. So your first instinct may be to skip over to, say, Saved by the Bell Joins the Army. Don't. This four-hour miniseries, a Canadian/Irish/New Zealand/American coproduction that concludes Monday, is amiable, and it boasts a remarkable performance by Vanessa Vaughan, a hearing-impaired actress who plays the young deaf woman who becomes Bell's wife. The first half, which covers Bell's childhood in Scotland, his work with the deaf in Boston and the development of the telephone, is livelier than the second, which has the inventor, now gray-bearded, noodling around with flight machines.
As the Scotsman Bell, New Zealander John Bach is better than okay, yet he never makes you feel you're in the presence of genius. Maybe that's because the phone is a technological wonder that we use today with so little thought.
PBS (Tues., July 20, 9 p.m. ET)
A
Frontline devotes four hours to an exhaustive, painful account of a North Carolina child sex-abuse case, still ongoing, that seems to have poisoned the town of Edenton (pop. 5,268). It began in 1989 with one child's accusations, made to a social worker, against Bob Kelly, owner of the Little Rascals day-care center; that charge escalated into indictments for more than 400 criminal offenses, including rape and sodomy, involving 29 preschoolers. Accused: Kelly, his wife, Betsy, three coworkers and two town residents. Kelly, the first to be tried, is now serving 12 consecutive life sentences.
Frontline has interviewed the Kellys; several of their codefendants and their attorneys; parents of the children; psychologists; and a handful of jurors, who make some startling revelations about their deliberations in the Bob Kelly trial. The children are not interviewed, although we hear their testimony—a terrifying but confusing litany of brutal acts that range from being forced to perform oral sex on "Mr. Bob" to watching him kill babies with a pistol. But the only solidly established incident of abuse—physical, not sexual—was that Bob Kelly once slapped a child. Was this a case of hysteria fanned by teams of therapists, police investigators and parents who unintentionally coached their children? That's the show's implication.
(David Hiltbrand is on vacation.)
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
