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It’s bonding time in PBS’ ‘My Boy Jack’

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Times Television Critic

“My Boy Jack,” a “Masterpiece Classic” presentation premiering Sunday on PBS, owes its existence to the actor Edward Herrmann having once suggested to the actor David Haig that he resembled Rudyard Kipling. From that slow-germinating seed, Haig eventually wrote a play about Kipling and his son, John, who died in the First World War just after his 18th birthday, and that eventually became this film.

It is sumptuous in the way one wants these English period pieces to be, with green countryside, good contemporary detail and scenes filmed at Kipling’s own house in Sussex. The source material limits it as a story somewhat, but the scenes play well and are full of nice human moments. It’s an actors’ picture -- not surprising, given the author’s day job.

Perhaps best known here, to the extent he’s known here at all, as the blustery Det. Inspector Derek Grim in the Rowan Atkinson police sitcom “The Thin Blue Line,” Haig has written himself a good role, with room to be big, small, broad, subtle, sincere and self-deceiving. (And he does resemble Rudyard Kipling.) He has clearly thought Kipling through: It’s difficult to re-create any actual person’s inner self, but the bigger the real-life model -- and the more experts there are to cavil -- the more crucial it is to base the interpretation on the facts.

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The other characters -- Kipling’s American wife, Carrie (Kim Cattrall, quite good); daughter Elsie (the excellent Carey Mulligan, recently of “Northanger Abbey”); and son John/Jack (Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself) -- are more pliable; they bend to the needs of the story. They’ve been conceived to create conflict that may not have existed in the genuine Kipling household but allows Haig to move ahead with dialectic -- the positive-negative charge that makes the picture move. This isn’t a biographical film so much as a family drama into which historical figures and events have been folded, and which might apply to other fathers and sons and other families in other wars. (You could call it timely, or timeless.)

John wants to join the military -- war is in the air, all his friends are enlisting -- but is rejected for his terrible eyesight; Kipling is his booster and not entirely welcome coach. “I can’t bear being gee’d up and encouraged,” John tells Elsie.

Like many 17-year-olds, he yearns to leave his parents’ house, to put some distance between himself and an opinionated father not stingy with advice. Kipling meanwhile regards getting his son into the service as a kind of shared project, a bonding experience, like building a model plane. When Kipling finally pulls the strings that allow John into the Irish Guards, he tells him, “I wish I could be in your shoes now.” Mother and sister are less enthused. Father will have cause to wonder whether he was the agent of his son’s demise.

A defender of colonial paternalism even as the sun is setting upon the empire upon which the sun never set, Haig’s Kipling is a little ball of compressed energy, coated in British reserve, whether speeding in his Rolls-Royce, campaigning for military conscription, or reading his Just-So Stories. (Some of his best scenes are with children; he has a soft center.) Later, despite his best efforts, he will deflate. Haig is brilliant in these moments.

The Elijah Wood of his generation, Radcliffe has begun to look beyond the Big Franchise. Here he smokes and drinks and wears a mustache -- which certainly distinguishes him from Harry Potter, but also has the possibly intentional ironic effect of emphasizing rather than disguising his evident youth. (He is not yet 19.)

The lieutenant’s cap he wears seems pointedly too big, so that he looks, appropriately, like a child dressed up in Daddy’s clothes. He seems even smaller in the trenches, all mud and rain and bad words. Radcliffe does some nice work here; he will doubtless overcome his child stardom.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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Masterpiece: ‘My Boy Jack’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

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