ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512080048
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
Aw-oh. Sensitive piano music tinkling under the opening credits. Could it be we're in for a ``very special'' drama about some ``very special'' people?
As a matter of fact, ``Journey,'' the Hallmark Hall of Fame drama airing tonight at 9, is very special, extremely special - but not in a cliched or cutesy sense. It does warm your heart, but subtly and with singular style. Give it half a chance to sneak up on you and take you by surprise and chances are, it will.
Only nominally about a journey, the film is named after its central character, an 11-year-old boy named Journey who must learn to cope with things as they are even when they seem a long way from things as they should be. In one of the earliest scenes, Journey's mother leaves him and his sister Cat to run off and find herself. The children remain behind on a bucolic farm under the watchful eyes of their maternal grandparents.
Deceptively simple in plot and execution, the story keeps adding resonance as it goes along, and though it goes along very slowly, it has a way of pulling one in. It helps that young Journey is played by an extraordinarily enigmatic young actor named Max Pomeranc, who starred in the film ``Searching for Bobby Fischer,'' and that grandfather is played by the great Jason Robards, who is fascinating even when, as in this film, he takes his own sweet time.
The film is a reminder of how sweet time can really be.
Min, the boy's mother, played by a bedraggled Meg Tilly, fights with her father as the film opens and hits the road in her battered Mustang convertible, but not before tearing up dozens of family photos kept in a box under a bed. Journey's father, it seems, ran off years before, so many that Journey hardly remembers him, and now his mother is deserting too.
At first, relations between Journey and his grandpa are icy. The boy even gives the old man a punch. But they warm to each other as they discover the ways in which they are similar. Grandma Lottie, played engagingly by Brenda Fricker, is strong and stern and nobody's fool. Grandpa is somebody's fool - Grandma's. How well these things work out sometimes!
Astonishingly little happens in the course of the film once the errant mother has departed. Grandpa takes up photography. Min thinks of calling home, but doesn't. Journey stands at the window gazing and brooding. Min calls home, but hangs up before talking. A pregnant kitty wanders onto the farm.
Later, the kitty comes to Journey's room. Journey pets the kitty. The kitty purrs. Journey shows the kitty to Grandpa. Grandpa says that the family rules require him to name the kitty immediately if he wants to keep it. Grandma enters, aghast to see the cat. Grandpa thinks quickly and gives it a name.
Does all this sound insufferably precious? Maybe, but it doesn't play that way. The writer, Patricia MacLachlan, adapting her own novel, sometimes writes dialogue that's too ``poetic'' and self-conscious, but she's able to create full-bodied portraits of complex characters with only a few sparse strokes. Nothing is wasted. Director Tom McLoughlin is keenly attentive to details - tin soldiers on a dresser, eggs stirred in a bowl, the lens of Grandpa's old camera - but pays the most attention to faces, especially those of Robards and Pomeranc.
Grandpa teaches Journey that, ``Nothing is perfect, but sometimes things are good enough.'' Yes, his parents were losers, but his grandparents are two in a million.
Life on the farm is quiet and uneventful, and at times you may think, ``What this kid needs is cable - or at least a television set.'' But the farm seems more and more idyllic as the film goes on, and by the end, you may wish you could live there, too, whiling away the days, dreaming away the nights, and reaching up to hold Grandpa's hand as he walks you down the dusty road that leads to the barn.
Even that sensitive piano music begins to sound pretty good. This is, after all, a wonderful film.
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 74 linesby CNB