TV REVIEW : ‘SHATTERED SPIRITS’: A NEW APPROACH

Television dramas about the pernicious effects of alcohol date back at least 30 years to “The Days of Wine and Roses” on “Playhouse 90.” But if there is nothing new to say on the subject, there are new ways of saying it, and “Shattered Spirits,” a TV movie airing at 9 tonight (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), does so compellingly.

Indeed, the beauty of the film is that it presumes we already know the facts about alcoholism, whether from other films, documentaries or the print media. No need for speeches, moralizing or judgments. What writer Gregory Goodell and producer-director Robert Greenwald have in mind is to take us inside a family and show the disease’s tragically corrosive influence at work.

That they do, chronicling in grim, often painful detail the lives of alcoholic Lyle Mollencamp, his weak, apologetic wife and their three emotionally scarred children.

So finely crafted and perceptively acted is their presention that one has the feeling of watching a documentary. We are joining these characters’ lives in progress, and we learn about them by observing their experiences over a period of months.

In a succession of richly textured but increasingly demoralizing incidents over the first half of the movie, we see the toll that Mollencamp’s drinking takes on the family--his lies, denial and guilt, the mother’s contributing feelings of helplessness, fear and repression, and the children’s agonizing ambivalence, striving for the nurturing love of parents whom they know are too unstable to give it.

The uniformly excellent cast is headed by Martin Sheen and Melinda Dillon as the parents, with Matthew Laborteaux, Roxana Zal and Lukas Haas as the children. Laborteaux, formerly of “Little House on the Prairie,” is particularly impressive as the 15-year-old boy who is the most affected by, yet least forgiving, of his father’s behavior. Zal, too, brings out subtle shadings in the eldest daughter, who most needs to excuse her father and pretend that everything is normal.

Eventually the Mollencamps hit bottom and are made to deal with their problem. Still, the film ends merely hopefully, not happily. The father is a long way from recovery, but he’s trying, and the other family members seem to have stabilized their lives.

Even that note of optimism is open to question with regard to Zal’s teen-age daughter, however, since there are indications that she may be doomed to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a servile, self-deprecating woman who might subconsciously seek out a domineering, potentially alcoholic or abusive husband.

The hope of “Shattered Spirits” is to break that ruinous cycle.