As any devotee of daytime talk shows will tell you, family is the source of some 90 percent of American emotional trauma. (The other 10 percent, of course, is surprise encounters sprung by talk show staffs.)
Our first roommates guide us–haltingly but, if we’re lucky, with love– from imperfect childhood into more imperfect adulthood, and seemingly stolid men and women devote lengthy and expensive courses of therapy to comprehending their relationships with their mothers and fathers.
But for all its significance, when it comes to portraying this pockmarked emotional landscape on something approaching realistic terms, television is a stoic.
You can’t touch a button on the remote without hitting another serious-minded dramatic series about cops, doctors or lawyers, and the set teems with sitcoms about improbably flip families and TV movies about fathers who can’t wait to dump their wives and kidnap the kiddies.
But there seems to be room on the prime-time schedule for just one family-themed, adult-oriented (in the literal, not video-store, sense of the term) dramatic series at a time: “Family,” “thirtysomething,” “Life Goes On.”
Fox’s “Party of Five” claims the current family slot, and while it’s a fine entertainment, it offers a pop version of the kinds of themes even 1994-95’s short-lived “My So-Called Life” treated.
If state government had the same legal interest in family dramas that it does in children, it would have long ago declared television an unfit parent.
This backdrop of benign neglect–it’s simply easier to write and find an audience for a good cop series, with its natural extremes of behavior, than a close treatment of a family, where the power chords are more subtle–makes HBO’s nearly three-hour “Grand Avenue” movie (7 p.m. Sunday) a welcome visitor to the television schedule.
Telling in careful detail, a somber tone and a kind of bluntly poetic language the story of a family’s move to a tough, working-class neighborhood in Santa Rosa, a city in Northern California, “Grand Avenue” is about love struggling to overcome all-too-human flaws.
Its protagonists are Mollie, a mother battling alcoholism and a lifetime of disappointment and resentment; Alice and Justine, two teen daughters who respond to their mother’s inconstancy in opposite ways, duty and near-delinquency; and Sheldon, a young, hyperobservant son.
A similar story was told, and with similar eloquence, in “Laurel Avenue,” the wonderful HBO mini-series of 1993, directed by Carl Franklin (“One False Move,” “Devil in a Blue Dress”).
There, though, the family fighting hard circumstance was African-American. Here, in a milieu that’s fresh to TV, they are Native American. Television is in the midst of a period of fascination with Indians, but it’s the historical Indian of epic documentaries and biopics about legendary chiefs.
This movie presents Indians as–surprise–contemporaries, figures not from some Wild West mythology but from the same America that gives us street gangs and teen promiscuity.
With help from Robert Redford (an executive producer) and his Sundance Insititute, it was adapted by Native American author and literature professor Greg Sarris from his acclaimed 1994 novel of the same title.
There is rich material here about what it means to be native to this America. The main story is simply the one of how this family will adjust to each other and its new home, but lurking is the question of whether the Indians who live in the neighborhood will agree to sell a burial ground to developers.
And an older Indian woman spots in Alice (Dianne Debassige), the teenager who serves as surrogate mother to her own mother and siblings, something spiritual that will let her apprehend some of the old ways.
But as powerfully as “Grand Avenue” treats the question of ethnicity, to reduce it to that would be a grand disservice.
Sarris’ story, directed with a documentary bluntness by Dan Sackheim that helps keep the sometimes melodramatic material from feeling contrived, skillfully connects Indian heritage with contemporary and classical themes.
I’ve seen dozens of Native American rituals represented on film, but never have I seen one pack as much punch as “Grand Avenue’s” healing dance performed over a cancerous cousin to the central family.
The scene takes its poignancy from the setting: a modern-day, middle-class living room, and a shaman figure whose outfit speaks more of an afternoon at the mall.
Upon the family’s arrival in Santa Rosa from a reservation, promiscuous Justine (Deeny Dakota) begins an immediate flirtation with the block’s gangbangers, but soon the hopefulness the family finds in its new situation leads her to give the sweet neighbor boy, and herself, a chance.
The boy, though, is the son of Steven Toms (A Martinez), the righteous Indian whose high school fling with Justine’s mother resulted in Justine.
Justine doesn’t know her father, but the inevitability of the half-siblings’ love for each other, and of its being forbidden when they discover their kinship, gives the film a timeless resonance.
And the uniformly fine cast helps overcome the toughest obstacle a family drama faces (and one that probably kills most of the good ones that come and go from television): getting the audience to connect closely, and quickly, with the characters.
Martinez and Irene Bedard (the voice of Disney’s Pocahontas) as his wife are the marquee stars, but the strongest performances come from Dakota, Debassige and Sheila Tousey as Mollie, the mother so detached from the role she reflexively passes to daughter Alice.
Tousey makes vivid Mollie’s battles with the tempting irresponsibility that alcohol represents. And there is a sag to her demeanor, and a small well of improbable, optimistic girlishness inside her, that suggests what Roseanne’s sitcom character might be if she didn’t have the burden of playing for laughs.
Dakota seems a touch too old for the part of Justine, but the animal hunger in her pretty, tightly drawn face suggests every teenager who’s insisted on finding something more in life.
And Debassige is quietly, deeply affecting as she sheds, an inch or two at a time, some of the restraints her self-imposed role as family caretaker has put upon her.
“Grand Avenue” uses raw, realistic language, and at 2 3/4 hours requires a substantial investment of time. But the rarity of such a work, and the emotional power of this one, make this hardscrabble American street a worthwhile destination.
Region of Doom: If I had a dollar for every new made-for-cable movie that tries to tell a noirish detective story, I’d have a lot of dollars.
The latest in the world-weary cop genre is called, oddly, “The Limbic Region” (apparently the part of the brain that lets sociopaths be sociopaths), and it debuts at 7 p.m. Sunday on Showtime.
Edward James Olmos, with his hangdog face, has a tough time taking his character from buoyant 1970s family man to 1990s ex-detective defeated by a taunting serial killer.
But there’s something intriguing in seeing Olmos, many years after leaving the force and his wife because of his obsession with the murderer, take his never-charged prime suspect for a ride.
Olmos has a fatal disease, and early on there is powerful tension in the question of whether he can bring himself to extract street justice from his suspect.
The story plays out, rather artfully, in flashback. But ultimately the killer is a tad too dull to sustain interest, and the story fizzles out without enough surprises to affect most any region of the brain.
