Unsentimental journey

With Christmas just around the corner, the merchants of culture will soon be grabbing for your heartstrings, that they may tug upon them until the tears pour from your eyes and you want to buy their sponsors’ soap. (The heartstring’s connected to the purse string.) We will have orphans and misfits and crabby old men who won’t understand the true meaning of the season until they’re scared half out of their wits and/or suddenly touched by the love of a small child. And there’ll be angels and elves, and great joyful weeping will be heard across the land. And, frankly, that’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s been a rough year, we deserve a good cry.

Still, the prospect of William H. Macy in a remake of the 1962 Jackie Gleason heartwarmer “Gigot,” in which Gleason -- who also wrote the story -- played a mute janitor befriending the daughter of a prostitute in old France, gave pause. How warm did I really want my heart, and was Macy the man to massage it? Now called “The Wool Cap” and premiering Sunday on TNT, the remake transplants the characters to contemporary New York City (represented, funnily enough, by the very French city of Montreal), jettisoning most everything but the idea of improvised family, as a lonely man (now a building supervisor, still mute, but with a dark secret) and lonely girl (mother a crack addict) come together in a cold town. And while it does warm the heart, a little, it does it without batting its big soft eyes at you or pawing at your sleeve or licking your hand. It plays fair.

“The Wool Cap” teams the actor for the seventh time with old college pal Steven Schachter -- they were students of David Mamet. Schachter is Macy’s director and co-writer here, as on last year’s Emmy harvesting “Door to Door” (also for TNT). Their work is not free from cliche, but as far as television goes, it is a model of naturalistic restraint. And on the level of craft, they are very good at what they do. The film is beautifully photographed as well, by Guy Dufaux (“Jesus of Montreal”), who knows what to do with snow.

If it’s all a little neat in the end, there’s really nowhere else for it to go, given that it’s a Christmas story (encompassing three Christmases, in fact). The film is funny here and there, but it’s not really a comedy, despite the presence of Don Rickles (as a kvetching old radical), a trained monkey and the happy ending for all. Except for a rather too present soundtrack, “The Wool Hat” is indeed strangely austere and even a little cruel, a sentimental story with most of the sentiment wrung out -- just the sort of thing, really, you’d expect from a couple of former students of Mamet.

There’s something almost Calvinist about this self-denial, this sacrifice of the deep pleasures of melodrama, but it has its benefits: If you don’t get the big squishy moments of love and hate that viewers like to wolf down like Mallomars, you do feel that you’re watching characters act as people in their situation actually might. The idea that love can make us want to be the equal of love, which is the big idea here, does not need much underlining.

Macy is famously a fine actor and does a lot keeping his mouth shut. Catherine O’Hara (“A Mighty Wind”) plays his sometime girlfriend and Ned Beatty his estranged father, and they are as fine as anyone who has seen them before would expect. Best of all is 11-year-old Keke Palmer -- never for a minute does she seem like she’s acting or that she’s anyone but who the script says she is.

*

‘The Wool Cap’

Where: TNT

When: 8 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, advisory for strong language)

William H. Macy...Gigot

Don Rickles...Ira

Ned Beatty...Gigot’s father

Keke Palmer...Lou

Cherise Boothe...Arleen

Catherine O’Hara...Gloria

Executive producers, David A. Rosemont, Frances Croke Page, Elaine Frontain Bryant. Director, Steven Schachter. Teleplay, William H. Macy and Steven Schachter.