Home Fires Burning

Too much time is spent setting up the homey 1944 small town setting with Barnard Hughes is a crusty newspaper editor married to the brittle Sada Thompson. Things get off to a shaky start when a young man flying a bi-plane accidentally fires shots into a cafe, setting the town into a frenzy. It's World War II, you know.

The trouble is that the viewer can't tell if this is supposed to be comic or not? It's such a stupid thing to show, and the townspeople overact to the point of farce. The guy's father (Robert Prosky) is Hughes' best friend, and their kids were married to each other. She's dead; he's in the war; the grandson (Neil Patrick Harris) lives with Hughes and Thompson.

Things get prickly when we learn that Hughes and his son (Bill Pullman) never got along and now he's reported missing in Europe. Hughes and Thompson have a big fight over his unforgiving ways, and then he has a fight with Prosky over the car crash that killed the daughter.

Things get even weirder when Pullman is reported killed in action and his body is sent home. In the meantime, Pullman's wife (Elizabeth Berridge) no one knew about shows up about ready to drop a baby.

Events from this point are far too unrealistic, and the film spins off into grim drama, eventually resolving none of the issues it has presented.

Hughes and Prosky are good. Thompson has basically nothing to do but look pained. Harris is OK. Berridge is OK. Pullman turns in a lousy performance. The other annoyance is the stupid names the characters have. Thompson plays a character named Pastine, while Prosky plays Rosh. No one ever comments on these ugly names or explains them. There are also characters named Fog, Biscuit, Alsatia, and Tunstall.

All the cars are gleamingly clean and new (for 1944) and so is the bi-plane. You can tell they were all recently taken out of a museum. That's where the script for this one should have stayed.

Home Fires Burning is one of the best novels I have ever read, and I'm glad that the novel's author - Robert Inman - actually wrote the teleplay. That way he got to preserve as much of the original as possible - which lamentably isn't much. In today's market, it would have been properly done as a mini-series, making good use of the rest of the book. Most of complete story occurs before the action on the screen and is vital to the character development of every character. Having to start the narrative with the airplane stunt gives the whole story a much lighter tone.

To be fair, this film would have been better titled, "Incidents from Home Fires Burning", because it strings together a set of occurrences which would have made far better sense if the viewer already know what had come before. The characters, as drawn, have little depth. The events, which here come out of nowhere, would seem quite expected. The relationships that brought them to this point could reveal so much.

However, in television, you don't get to tell the story you want, you tell the story you've got. There are brilliant actors comprising this cast - not a weak portrayal in the bunch. But very few would have done the real story credibly. Too old, mostly. And that's the problem here: Too many lose ends that - even superficially - could never have been explained away with this cast.

It is hard to review this production, knowing what could/should have been. This story just can't br compressed into an hour and a half. The bottom line is that it really doesn't work. Some stories just shouldn't be told if they can't be told well. This one isn't told well.