CBS (Sun., Feb. 7, 9 p.m. ET)
B+
This Hallmark Hall of Fame production is the sequel to the successful 1991 TV movie Sarah. Plain and Tall, in which Glenn Close played Sarah Wheaton, a Maine woman who in 1910 becomes the mail-order bride of Jacob Witting (Christopher Walken), a widowed Kansas farmer with two children.
This movie explores the blossoming of their contracted marriage. It's played out against the hardship of a drought on the prairie, which forces Sarah to take the children and return for a time to Maine. The story is told in the same modest hand-stitched wall-sampler poetry of the original, extolling hard work and devotion.
Close gives another luminous performance as Sarah. And Walken, usually such a disturbing, volatile presence" on the screen, is once again surprisingly warm and sympathetic as the laconic Jacob.
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