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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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120489
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12048900.062
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1990-09-19
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VIDEO, Page 92Let's Hear It for FictionBy Richard Zoglin
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
CBS; Dec. 3; 9 p.m. EST
As the year of the TV-news re-enactment comes to a close, a
backlash has set in. Last week NBC News announced it would stop
using the controversial technique. CBS's Saturday Night with Connie
Chung is reportedly considering whether to phase out its
re-creations as well. Meanwhile, TV movies like The Final Days are
drawing fire from some critics for using fictional techniques to
tamper with "reality."
So it may be time to speak up for fiction. Dramatizations of
historical events and social issues, though troubling when they
mingle with news, do have their place, as playwrights from
Shakespeare to Shaw have proved. Even the lowly TV docudrama
occasionally shows what the form can do. A moving and eloquent film
such as No Place Like Home, about a working-class family that
descends into homelessness, not only puts human flesh on an
abstract problem but also transforms it into something approaching
tragedy.
Lee Grant, the actress-filmmaker who directed this CBS movie,
has dealt with homelessness from both sides of the fact-fiction
divide. In 1986 she won an Academy Award for her documentary Down
and Out in America. A couple interviewed in that film who had been
burned out of their Brooklyn apartment and were living with their
five children in a welfare hotel apparently provided the models for
Mike and Zan Cooper, the parents played by Jeff Daniels and
Christine Lahti in No Place Like Home. They too lose their home in
a fire, which takes not only all their belongings but also Mike's
job as the building superintendent. From there, the family of four
is thrust into an odyssey of urban rootlessness. They live at a
motel until it gets too expensive; with Mike's brother and
sister-in-law before an argument drives them away; at a campground
before regulations force them to move on. Finally, they turn to a
city shelter, from which they are sent to a seedy welfare hotel.
"Mommy, I don't like it here," says little Tina on seeing their sad
room, with its peeling plaster, rattraps and dusty bunk bed.
"Honey, it won't be for too long," says Mom.
She's right, unfortunately. Mike loses his part-time job and
must leave the city to look for work. At the hotel, a security
guard sexually attacks Zan while threatening to turn in her son
David for making drug runs. Forced to flee the shelter, mother and
children show up at Mike's brother's door, but find no one home.
In desperation they break into the house but are rousted out by the
police. Their next stop: the streets.
No Place Like Home does not escape some TV-movie
simplifications. The minor characters, like Mike's oily boss, are
often cardboard villains. The Cooper kids (Lantz Landry and Kyndra
Joy Casper) seem too well scrubbed for these mean streets, and the
film draws back from the worst consequences of the horrific
environment: though David makes drug deliveries to earn money, for
instance, he somehow never tries drugs.
But the movie brings homelessness home by presenting it not as
a cause for charity but as a recognizable human misfortune, almost
inevitable given the circumstances. Grant's direction is both
sensitive and street-smart (filming was done in Pittsburgh).
Daniels, though too fresh-faced as the blue-collar father, brings
hot-tempered passion to the role. And Lahti, possibly the best
actress in America working in TV (she won an Emmy nomination for
her performance in the mini-series Amerika), is truly
heartbreaking. She can convey both the despair lurking behind a
brave comment to her husband and a pathetic joy at ever smaller
victories. "You guys, look!" she gasps on first seeing their
decrepit bathroom in the welfare hotel. "Privacy!" In the
controversy over fact vs. fiction, real artistry can settle a lot
of debates.