TV MOVIE REVIEW : ‘FINNEGAN’ STRIKES DOWN AGEISM

“Finnegan Begin Again” (debuting on HBO Sunday at 8 p.m.) is a real winner about two people who are starting to think of themselves as losers.

Heartwarming and funny, this bittersweet romantic comedy has just about everything going for it: Mary Tyler Moore, Robert Preston, Sam Waterston and Sylvia Sidney in top form under the direction of Joan Micklin Silver, who excels at intimate drama; an offbeat and original script by Walter Lockwood and a great, natural look, thanks to gifted West German cameraman Robby Muller (whose last film was “Paris, Texas”). If “Finnegan Begin Again” could be described as women’s magazine fiction, it is the best of that genre.

Moore and Preston meet on a Richmond, Va., bus. She’s a long-widowed schoolteacher, caught up in an affair with married undertaker Waterston. He’s a newspaperman, three months past mandatory retirement at 65 and relegated to the advice-to-the-lovelorn column, which he’s about to lose if it doesn’t pick up.

In person, Preston is so courtly and affable he’s something of a character; in print, however, he reveals underneath the bonhomie the bitterness of a man turned out to pasture and shackled to a wife (Sidney) 10 years older than he and unhinged since the death of their only son decades ago at the age of 10.

At first Moore recoils from Preston’s bluntness but gradually learns to welcome it. Each is in need of a friend; Moore mellows Preston, and Preston gives Moore a clearer view of her affair with Waterston, who’s really a nerd with no real intention of ever leaving his wife. But then each is struck with a major crisis. . . .

Above all, “Finnegan Begin Again” strikes a blow at ageism. Until it becomes clear that it is the film’s major point, Preston’s newspaperman embarrasses us by seeming to feel forever obliged to apologize for growing older and to joke about his waning sexual drives (which is more likely due to a lack of inspiration than to any physical cause). Clearly, this man is young at heart but our society keeps telling him he should feel and act old.

There are lots of pratfalls and the like to keep things light and airy, but “Finnegan Begin Again” is at core serious. Its small cast, which includes David Huddleston as Preston’s tough but concerned editor, is quite irresistible.

Moore combines such warmth with an astringent wit that it’s hard to believe she was also the icy wife and mother of “Ordinary People.” Preston, who must hold the patent on charm, is a joy to behold. (There’s an especially lovely, improvised moment when Preston does a little dance as he follows a kid with a ghetto blaster.)

Waterston, just Oscar-nominated for his conscience-stricken journalist in “The Killing Fields,” is here a comic delight, and Sidney is extraordinary as a vague, drifting woman jolted back into focus by severe illness.

“Finnegan Begin Again” looks good on a big screen and in quality is better than most theatrical films. But it hasn’t any violence, car chases or even clinical sex or much strong language, and it does have as its stars a woman nearing 50 and a man pushing 70, all of which doesn’t add up to what is believed to be box office appeal.

No matter: It will glow on the tube.