Carter, whose claim to TV fame was as ‘Wonder Woman,’ wouldn’t know how to play swept away if you cast her opposite an Oscar-nominated broom.
“LaVyrle Spencer’sFamily Blessings”
OLDER widow falls in love with earnest young man but almost allows her hangups and her disapproving family to break them up.
If you want to see that story done in four-hanky style, rent 1955’s “All That Heaven Allows” and cheer as the young Rock Hudson wins over the skittish Jane Wyman.
If you want to see that story done laughably, watch a stick-figure adaption of LaVyrle Spencer’s best-selling novel, “Family Blessings,” which has been mysteriously titled “LaVyrle Spencer’s Family Blessings.”
Spencer shares executive-producer credit and, thus, blame for the flimsy mess of a TV movie that makes the average Lifetime Television movie look like a David Lean epic.
Deborah Raffin shares producer credits with her schlock-publisher husband Michael Viner.
Raffin also shared the directing chores with Nina Foch, who, alas, is not up to directing herself as also a disapproving mother, much less Lynda Carter as the woman swept away by a forbidden love.
Carter, whose most legitimate claim to TV fame was as “Wonder Woman,” wouldn’t know how to play swept away if you cast her opposite an Oscar-nominated broom.
No matter how much she might want to get back in the prime-time mix, Carter should have run like the wind.
Instead, she contributed pictures of her real-life hubby, erstwhile Washington, D.C., insider Robert Altman, to the opening credits that make it clear that her character, Lee Reston, is mother love personified.
Lee long ago learned to smile though her heart is breaking. She lost an infant son and husband.
Now she’s lost a cop son, who is killed not in the line of duty but riding a motorcycle without his helmet.
“Grief has a way of sneaking back and blindsiding you,” she tells sonny’s roommate, Chris Lallek (Steven Eckholdt), a preppily hunky cop with a heart of butter.
“I loved him, but I never told him,” sobs Chris, manfully.
“You did,” sobs Mother Reston, “by washing his car and showing him how to get along in the world.”
It seems Chris’s childhood was one of abuse and neglect because of an alcoholic father (Ken James) and ineffectual mother (Bonnie Bartlett), whose tirades he’s now required to settle as a cop.
And Chris manufactures the feeling of family whenever he can.
He has become an unofficial big brother to Judd (Kevin Duhaney), who has to take refuge in a cardboard box whenever alcohol and less legal substances are being abused by the loud residents of his offensively portrayed ghetto corner.
Judd’s mother is played by Pam Grier.
It’s a cameo not even as big as the head of a pin and so thankless that we were mystified as to why the woman reborn in “Jackie Brown” would have bothered.
‘Cause it was made in 1996, that’s why.
Viewers have the chance to wince as this treacly romance builds predictably but not gracefully to the obligatory scene in which they will go to bed for the first time surrounded by a thousand points of candlelight.
Only thus will any real heat be generated.