TV Reviews : A Cool Encounter in Wilson’s ‘Curtain’

A “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation of Lanford Wilson’s recent Broadway play “Redwood Curtain,” about a Vietnamese American teen-ager’s search for her father, certainly merits our expectation.

But despite its tantalizing ingredients and a cast that includes John Lithgow, Jeff Daniels and the American film debut of “Miss Saigon’s” own Lea Salonga, the movie is surprisingly thin and curiously disappointing.

The play (which premiered in Southern California two years ago at the Old Globe Theatre) has been expanded with essentially a new act for the movie that dramatizes the figure of the girl’s tortured adoptive father (Lithgow), who was talked about on stage but never seen.

Essentially a mystery play, the Amerasian’s search for her GI biological father leads through a jarring encounter with a grimy, sunglassed, antisocial Vietnam vet (Daniels) hiding from society in the Northern California redwoods, among a few hundred other (unseen) casualties of the war.

Both the demonized, alcoholic Lithgow and the guttural, unrecognizable Daniels are fascinating outsiders. A dry-witted aunt (Debra Monk, who, like Daniels, re-creates her Broadway role) contributes wry, brassy relief. And Salonga, playing a concert piano prodigy who needs to find her American father in order to help untap her gifts and understand who she is, delivers a bright, intelligent performance, although a shade controlled.

But an off-putting weightlessness hovers over the movie.

As directed by John Korty from the expanded teleplay by Ed Namzug, a metallic coolness ices down the whole first half of the production. Even when the setting shifts from the tremulous home of the unhappy adoptive parents (Lithgow and Catherine Hicks), with their gleaming white walls and indoor pool, to the canopied forest and the homeless warrior, the material remains dry and bloodless.

* “Redwood Curtain” airs Sunday, 9 p.m. on ABC, Channel 7.