ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, June 22, 1996 TAG: 9606250008
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
On a bright June afternoon in Charlottesville, Va., while her two daughters and their friends frolicked outside on their first day of summer vacation, Sissy Spacek talked about a Showtime movie she made last fall that is set largely within a prison.
``Beyond the Call'' (Sunday night at 8) is the story of a Connecticut woman who learns that her first love is on death row for having shot and killed a policeman. He is only weeks away from execution.
Married and the mother of two children, Pam O'Brien hasn't seen Russell Cates since they were teen-agers. Nevertheless, she heeds a request by his sister, Fran, who says he is so depressed he will not even seek clemency.
Pam journeys to South Carolina and discovers that there is some question about his guilt, urges him to try for a pardon and as they renew their friendship, she gives him hope - for all its bittersweet worth.
But Pam O'Brien's visits to see Cates are straining her own marriage. Like Cates, Keith O'Brien too has been unable to exorcise the demons of his Vietnam service. Not until he goes with her to the prison to meet Cates is he able to face what he has buried for years.
David Strathairn plays the prisoner; Arliss Howard, the husband. Both have strong acting credits, including Strathairn's in ``The Firm,'' ``Silkwood'' and ``Losing Isaiah,'' and Howard's in ``Men Don't Leave,'' ``Full Metal Jacket'' and, most recently, ``To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.''
The scene they play together, reinforcing the psychological trauma that each suffered during the war, is easily the most powerful of the movie.
Emily Andrews and Ross Hull play Pam and Russell as teen-agers.
``Beyond the Call'' is fiction, with a parental advisory for language, but was inspired by actual events. Spacek, who is known more for her theatrical films (beginning with ``Badlands'' in 1973) than for television work, said she chose it because of the script.
``I was really moved by the story,'' she said. ``It's rare to find good scripts that mean something, that have some socially redeeming value. It's food for thought. It's about human emotion and human relations and Vietnam veterans and post-traumatic stress.
``This is a wound that the whole country feels, and I feel it because I lived through that time. I'm ashamed to say I was not as aware as I should have been about American veterans of that war, who were from my generation, and what they suffered and how they did when they came back. What a cross to bear for those men who are now in their middle age. Some were able to step back into their society and contribute great things, and others were wounded and not able to resume their lives.''
Spacek said she also was attracted by the situation of her character, Pam, who felt she owed something to Cates because he had helped her when she was a teen-ager and her parents were separating.
``When I read the story, I was so moved by the fact that this was someone from her past that she really cared about deeply and was afraid, not knowing what to do,'' said Spacek. ``Sometimes you're kind of in a quandary, and you don't know what's right. That became, for me, the main message of the movie: that there's always hope for the human spirit, and that we are more than our sum total.''
Spacek also pointed out that unlike films in which prison guards are pictured as sadistic, these guards come across as decent men. One chuckles while he is monitoring their conversation (and then gets chewed out by Cates for it); one offers Pam O'Brien a chair when she arrives to talk with Cates and has nowhere to sit; one realizes that she is not Cates' relative, but, against regulations, lets her in anyway.
Spacek said she did not make the film because she either favors or opposes capital punishment.
``In my life I've had mixed emotions about that,'' she said. ``If we could snap our fingers and all the evil people in the world could disappear, that would be a wonderful thing. But it's not a perfect system, and you worry about the ones that shouldn't have been executed. But I didn't do this film because I want to eradicate the death penalty.''
Spacek paused during the conversation about executions and death penalties to check the activities of her daughters, Madison and Schuyler, outside.
With a mother who is an Oscar-winning actress (``Coal Miner's Daughter'') and a father (Jack Fisk) who is a producer-director, Schuyler, 13, is accumulating her own acting credits. She has appeared in local theater productions and in the recent film ``The Baby-Sitters Club.''
With second grade behind her, Madison, 8, is ``Huckleberry Finn,'' said Spacek. ``She's out making altars and burial sites for the cicadas'' that plagued mid-Virginia this spring.
Texas-born Spacek, who traces some of her family lineage to Culpeper, Va., an hour north, said living near Charlottesville has afforded the family privacy and has proved to be workable for both her career and her husband's. His mother has a cottage on their farm, she said.
``Beyond the Call'' is the third of Showtime's original summer movies, part of the cable service's 20th anniversary season. Showtime, owned and operated by Viacom Inc., was founded July 1976 and is a premium service carrying movies, boxing, miniseries, family fare and original comedy series and movies.
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Sissy Spacek stars in "Beyond the Call" Sunday at 8 p.m.by CNBon Showtime.|