TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120489/12048900.062

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 4KB | 79 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 92

Let's Hear It for Fiction


By Richard Zoglin


    NO PLACE LIKE HOME
    CBS; Dec. 3; 9 p.m. EST

    As the year of the TV-news re-enactment comes to a close,
a backlash has set in. Last week NBC News announced it would
stop using the controversial technique. CBS's Saturday Night
with Connie Chung is reportedly considering whether to phase out
its re-creations as well. Meanwhile, TV movies like The Final
Days are drawing fire from some critics for using fictional
techniques to tamper with "reality."

    So it may be time to speak up for fiction. Dramatizations
of historical events and social issues, though troubling when
they mingle with news, do have their place, as playwrights from
Shakespeare to Shaw have proved. Even the lowly TV docudrama
occasionally shows what the form can do. A moving and eloquent
film such as No Place Like Home, about a working-class family
that descends into homelessness, not only puts human flesh on
an abstract problem but also transforms it into something
approaching tragedy.

    Lee Grant, the actress-filmmaker who directed this CBS
movie, has dealt with homelessness from both sides of the
fact-fiction divide. In 1986 she won an Academy Award for her
documentary Down and Out in America. A couple interviewed in
that film who had been burned out of their Brooklyn apartment
and were living with their five children in a welfare hotel
apparently provided the models for Mike and Zan Cooper, the
parents played by Jeff Daniels and Christine Lahti in No Place
Like Home. They too lose their home in a fire, which takes not
only all their belongings but also Mike's job as the building
superintendent. From there, the family of four is thrust into
an odyssey of urban rootlessness. They live at a motel until it
gets too expensive; with Mike's brother and sister-in-law before
an argument drives them away; at a campground before regulations
force them to move on. Finally, they turn to a city shelter,
from which they are sent to a seedy welfare hotel. "Mommy, I
don't like it here," says little Tina on seeing their sad room,
with its peeling plaster, rattraps and dusty bunk bed. "Honey,
it won't be for too long," says Mom.

    She's right, unfortunately. Mike loses his part-time job
and must leave the city to look for work. At the hotel, a
security guard sexually attacks Zan while threatening to turn
in her son David for making drug runs. Forced to flee the
shelter, mother and children show up at Mike's brother's door,
but find no one home. In desperation they break into the house
but are rousted out by the police. Their next stop: the streets.

    No Place Like Home does not escape some TV-movie
simplifications. The minor characters, like Mike's oily boss,
are often cardboard villains. The Cooper kids (Lantz Landry and
Kyndra Joy Casper) seem too well scrubbed for these mean
streets, and the film draws back from the worst consequences of
the horrific environment: though David makes drug deliveries to
earn money, for instance, he somehow never tries drugs.

    But the movie brings homelessness home by presenting it not
as a cause for charity but as a recognizable human misfortune,
almost inevitable given the circumstances. Grant's direction is
both sensitive and street-smart (filming was done in
Pittsburgh). Daniels, though too fresh-faced as the blue-collar
father, brings hot-tempered passion to the role. And Lahti,
possibly the best actress in America working in TV (she won an
Emmy nomination for her performance in the mini-series Amerika),
is truly heartbreaking. She can convey both the despair lurking
behind a brave comment to her husband and a pathetic joy at ever
smaller victories. "You guys, look!" she gasps on first seeing
their decrepit bathroom in the welfare hotel. "Privacy!" In the
controversy over fact vs. fiction, real artistry can settle a
lot of debates.