At the opening of "Oprah Winfrey Presents: Before Women had Wings," Winfrey herself appears onscreen to tell viewers that the movie "is the story of a young girl trying to love a mother who continues to abuse her. It shows us that, no matter how victimized you may feel in your own life, if there is someone who is willing to show you that they love you it can give you wings."
Those are wonderful sentiments, wonderfully expressed. If only the movie lived up to them. And this handsomely produced TV movie, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on ABC/Ch 4, features some good performances and high production standards.Not that this is by any means a recommendation. "Before Women had Wings" is not a pleasant viewing experience. There's a fine line between portraying child abuse and exploiting it - and this telefilm comes down somewhere on the wrong side of that line.
Personally, I'm tired of watching children getting beaten up in television movies. That is not my idea of entertainment.
I'm not real big on watching adults getting beaten up, either. And in "Wings," we get to see both.
It's a mystery to me who would find some of these horrifying scenes anything less than painful to watch.
And don't talk to me about how this is a story about the triumph of the spirit. There's not much triumphing going on in "Wings." If there's a message that Winfrey and Co. were trying to send, it got lost somewhere in the translation.
Based on the book by Connie May Fowler, "Before Women had Wings" is the saga of a severely dysfunctional family in the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of a pre-pubescent daughter named Bird (Tina Majorino). Bird's mother, Glory (Ellen Barkin), and father, Billy (John Savage), are a hideously co-dependent couple - they're both drunks, and he beats the crud out of her with some frequency. (There's a perfectly atrocious scene in which he knocks out at least one of her teeth.)
Things don't improve when dear old dad kills himself. Glory packs up her daughters - Bird and the teenage Phoebe (Julia Stiles) - and moves to Tampa, where she takes a job at a motel and moves her diminished family into a run-down old trailer. Glory is still pining for Billy, so, naturally, she starts beating the crud out of her daughters.
Lovely.
Oprah Winfrey comes into the mix as Miss Zora, a somewhat mysterious woman who befriends young Bird. Which, of course, doesn't sit well with bigoted, poor-white-trash Glory.
Some of the violent scenes are handled with more discretion than others. We do not, for example, actually see most of Glory's blows landing on young Bird. We simply see the mother flailing away and hear the daughter screaming.
Gee, thanks, Oprah.
Winfrey somehow sees something uplifting in all of this. I would respectfully disagree. What we have here is a mother who's wildly violent against her daughters and then extravagantly, tearfully sorry. Her ultimate solution is unrealistic and unsatisfying.
"Before Women had Wings" doesn't so much conclude as it ends abruptly.
And, while it's the daughters - particularly Bird - who supposedly have triumphant spirits, there's no evidence of that here.
Obviously, Winfrey had good intentions when she made this TV movie. But good intentions don't always make for good movies.
Particularly not when viewers are subjected to alcoholism, wife-beating, suicide and child abuse along the way.
MURDER, SHE REWROTE: There's something almost comforting about having Angela Lansbury back on television playing super-sleuth Jessica Fletcher.
Which is kind of weird, when you think about it. Corpses crop up no matter where this woman goes.
Still, it's nice to see Lansbury once again in the first of what is planned as a series of "Murder, She Wrote" movies (Sunday, 8 p.m., CBS/Ch. 2) - this one titled "South by Southwest."
(There's some slight resemblence to Hitchcock's classic "North by Northwest" - but only very slight.)
There's certainly no surprise when Jessica gets caught up in a murder mystery. In the movie's opening moments, we see a man shot to death in Los Angeles.
Jessica befriends the chief witness in the case (Mel Harris of "thirtysomething") on a cross-country train trip - a trip that includes another murder and the witness' sudden disappearance.
The mystery expands to include various agencies of the government - the FBI, the CIA and the NSA. Not to mention the secret codes to America's spy satellites.
Along the way, people turn out to be something other than what they seem. And there are a few clues dropped that even the dumbest of us can pick up on.
OK, so "South by Southwest" is a bit too long. OK, so it stretches credulity on several points.
People who like Lansbury and "Murder, She Wrote" aren't going to care. They're just going to be happy to have a new installment of this much-loved series.