Subject: Director Reeve's Twilight Tale Date: Published: 04/21/97 (99 lines of text) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Television: Director Reeve's Twilight Tale By Barbara D. Phillips Four years ago, The New Yorker published an austerely beautiful short story, "In the Gloaming," by Alice Elliott Dark. In the space of just eight pages (including several ads, one droll cartoon, and filler line drawings of a foot, a woman reading a book, and three potted bunny-ear cacti) it told of Janet, an affluent suburban housewife in an unhappy marriage, who comes to cherish the time she spends in the fading light with her 33-year-old son, Laird, who has come home to die. That home is firmly in the WASP territory we so associate with the old New Yorker and its Gretchen Dow Simpson covers, though Janet, in fact, is a Scottish-American lass who told her son when he was just a boy of the gloaming -- when, Laird recalls, "for a few moments the purple light made the whole world look like the Scottish Highlands on a summer night." Much of the story's power comes from the understated elegance of Ms. Dark's voice, and from what she leaves unsaid. Though Laird is dying of AIDS, "In the Gloaming" is not the by-now-standard story filled with a gay victim's anger at the "straight" world, at his family's failure to understand. It is Janet's story -- that of a mother rediscovering her love for her son in the twilight of his life; that of a wife coming to terms with decades of emotional estrangement from her workaholic husband, Martin, who awkwardly reaches out to her at the end. HBO's adaptation of "In the Gloaming," which premiered last night and will be rebroadcast Thursday at 1:45 p.m. and 11:55 p.m. EDT and Saturday at 4:30 p.m. EDT, boasts a radiant performance by Glenn Close as Janet, and the story's outlines remain, as do all the accouterments of Martha Stewart living. (The film was shot on location in Pound Ridge, N. Y.). But while director Christopher Reeve does a fine job with the actors, who include Whoopi Goldberg in a cameo as the nurse, he and screenwriter Will Scheffer have chosen to trust neither Ms. Dark nor the intelligence of the viewer -- mistakes, large and small, that turn 70 minutes of television into rarely relieved tedium. While large chunks of Ms. Dark's dialogue remain in some form or other, they have been supplemented by earnest speeches that leave no cliche interred and shift the focus toward the son. Laird, transmogrified into Danny (Robert Sean Leonard), so that Ms. Close can sing "Danny Boy" to her dying son, makes his final journey home not from Manhattan, as the story implies, but from San Francisco. His sister, Anne (Bridget Fonda), a loving if matronly presence in the Dark story (and barely seen at all), has been transformed into a bitter homophobe who refuses to take her little boy to visit her dying brother, and who attacks her mother for favoring Danny and somehow making him gay -- a mistake she vows not to repeat with her own son. And Janet and Martin (David Strathairn) are made to do penance for not inviting their son's live-in lover, an HBO invention, to years of Thanksgiving dinners. By the program's end, he gets an invitation -- to come stay for Danny's funeral. Other changes have less to do with sexual politics than with the dumbing down so rife in Hollywood: The names of the months are superimposed on the screen so that we can't possibly miss the passage of time. Janet's guilty taste for true-crime books becomes one for gory movies. While Laird's room in the story had long ago been turned into an attractive, impersonal guest room, Danny's room is still filled with the trophies of his adolescence, reminders of his athletic prowess that his father cherishes (this Martin, a '90s variant on the high-WASP stereotype, keeps himself in shape). Are these the sins of a neophyte director, or the fault of an over-eager screenwriter itching to put his own mark on the work? A feature article by Steve Daly in Entertainment Weekly earlier this month provides some clues: "Last May, he [Mr. Reeve] opened his first meeting with executives from HBO NYC ...by insisting on a top-to-bottom rewrite of the teleplay they'd brought him. Adapted from Alice Elliott Dark's spare New Yorker story, playwright Will Scheffer's script, in Reeve's estimation, contained `too many words.'" In a later discussion of casting battles, Mr. Daly says, "The vision of Gloaming that Reeve believed was well worth such mortal combat -- and that he very much feels he ultimately achieved -- was to keep the film an unsparing tragedy that emphasized the sorrows of an estranged, gay-unfriendly family." Mr. Reeve, in that, succeeded all too well. But "In the Gloaming" can work on television while staying true to Ms. Dark's vision. This need not be taken on faith alone; New York's Trinity Church (in the TV production business since 1985) made just such a film, which ran on the Odyssey (formerly Faith & Values) cable channel five months ago. That production, filmed on location in West Cornwall, Conn., and directed by Helen Whitney from a screenplay by Robert Owens Scott, respected the author's evocative words, transforming much of her narration into dialogue and cleverly packaging the whole story as Janet's recollection, which comes full circle at the end. The Trinity version's flaws were slight. Lonny Price is a strong actor, but he is a plain-looking man whose Laird lacked the air of ruined handsomeness that comes naturally to Mr. Leonard's Danny; he played the role with nary a trace of Laird's playfulness. But David Howard, an older, heavier Martin, given by Trinity a love of opera-record collecting instead of the HBO Martin's love of sports, gave Mr. Strathairn a run for his money as a man on the periphery of his family. And Diane Kagan was every bit Ms. Close's match as Janet, imbuing her with intelligence and self-deprecating charm. In an October 1995 article by Alistair Highet in the Litchfield County Times, Trinity producer Linda Hanick said of her $200,000-budget "Gloaming": "We look for short stories for adaptation where contemporary characters are searching. We don't give the answer. What we try to do is honor the search." According to Ms. Hanick, the Dark story was picked "because it's about a family who is making connections at the last moment, and it's all very subtle." NS ART RVW RE NME US JN LNA DNS Arts & Entertainment; Reviews DRE North America; United States DJN Leisure & Arts [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]