Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 10, 1994 TAG: 9412130004
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON MILLER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``I was shaking when I finished the book,'' Thomas recalled. ``I was on vacation with my husband, and we were supposed to go to dinner, but I couldn't. It just overwhelmed me.''
Later that night, Thomas and husband Phil Donahue, the talk show host, tried to figure out why the story of a woman whose child dies had gripped her so completely. At that time, Thomas says, she had not experienced a comparable loss in her own life, but the novel by Linda Gray Sexton made her understand how it might feel.
``This book has what life has,'' Thomas explained. ``You think you have it all worked out, that you know what's going to happen day to day. You make certain assumptions about life - that you'll live longer than your parents, that you won't outlive your own children, that the sun will come up in the morning and the moon will come out at night. But there can be a randomness that's just like lightning striking.''
Then, in 1991, after she had bought movie rights to the book and decided to produce it for television, Thomas experienced a loss that permanently bonded her with Jessie, the book's leading character: the death of her father and lifelong professional mentor, the legendary Danny Thomas.
``Obviously, while I was making the film, I was in touch with the loss that I felt,'' said Thomas from New York, where she was between performances of Michael Cristofer's play ``Shadow Box,'' the acclaimed production at Circle in the Square.
Ironically, that play also is about coping with death and the grief that follows. In the finale of the show, the players come out on stage and remind the audience to live for life, because ``this is what you have now.''
``That's what I want people to take away from this movie: This is what you have right now, so don't waste it. Don't kill yourself, don't go under, don't just survive, but thrive and choose life,'' Thomas said of the film she and her collaborator, actress-director Lee Grant, have made from Sexton's book.
The movie, which premieres Sunday on CBS (at 9 p.m. on WDBJ-Channel 7), is called ``Reunion.'' It's a powerful, haunting, poignant and beautiful work that may create the sort of award-winning stir that Thomas and Grant did with their first work together, ``Nobody's Child,'' which earned Thomas the 1986 best-actress Emmy and Grant the Director's Guild award.
In the film, Thomas plays Jessie Yates, a promising amateur painter who has suppressed her career ambitions in order to give her full attention to making a good home for her hard-working husband, Sam (Peter Strauss), and being a good mother to their children, 10-year-old Anna and 5-year-old twins Jamie (Matthew Kelly) and Meggie (Courtney Chase).
The twins have a special bond, but the carefree Jamie is much more precious to Jessie because of his difficult birth and fragile infancy. She may subconsciously feel he needs her special protection in life because they were joined so early in a struggle against his death.
That bond between mother and son continues even after the boy's tragic childhood death, an event that devastates the family and threatens to burst the seams that had held so well through the strain of financial crises and other more predictable difficulties.
Pushed to the verge of a breakdown, Jessie begins to pull away from Sam as she grows more and more certain that Jamie is still with her, trying to break through to her in some mysterious way. His twin sister also feels this communication and, because she knows no better, may accept it more readily than anyone.
``If it was an ordinary television movie, it would be about the death of a child, and that would be that,'' said Thomas. ``But when you watch this movie, you really don't know where it's going to go.''
What's more, the film can be enjoyed fully at any level. Artfully photographed on snowy locations near Montreal, it has enough evocative moments of ghostly visions to be a cousin to Jack Cardiff's eerie film ``The Innocents'' from Henry James' classic ghost story, ``The Turn of the Screw.'' But it also gets to the roots of a family's interconnected bonds and works well as a serious drama in which nothing truly supernatural takes place.
``I think the child is there,'' Thomas said. ``It's important for me, as an actress, to believe that, because, for Jessie, the child is there. As a producer, I really don't know. Who possibly knows if that child came back or if it's in her head? We don't know for sure if there's life after death. I've had dreams where my father talks to me - and I've taken his advice. Does it come from my subconscious - or from his?''
by CNB