TV REVIEW : ‘CHILDREN’ LEAVES VIEWERS HUNGRY

There’s undoubtedly a compelling movie to be made about the terrible famine and starvation in Ethiopia that triggered massive anti-hunger campaigns in the West. Unfortunately, “We Are the Children” isn’t it.

After Live Aid and Farm Aid, etc., what’s needed here is Story Aid. Not to be skeptical, but there’s just something about a guy and gal finding love and romance among human ruins and body-counts that doesn’t really work.

Airing at 9 tonight on ABC (Channels 3, 7 and 10), “We Are the Children” is a Paulist Picture, in association with Dan Fauci/Ted Danson Productions and the Furia Organization, that surely rose from good intentions.

The setting is 1984, before global attention belatedly focused on the plight of starving Ethiopians. Annie Keats (Ally Sheedy), an idealistic young physician from Philadelphia, arrives in Ethiopia to begin work as a volunteer in a tiny village and is befriended there by a nun (Judith Ivey) and a cynical free-lance TV photojournalist Duffy Lynch (Ted Danson).

Appalled by the suffering of homeless refugees, Annie urges the reluctant Duffy to record the horror and spread the word. The story follows a familiar path: hope, then disillusionment, then renewal.

Filmed in northern Kenya, “We Are the Children” is effective only when showing pictures of the suffering and downtrodden. There are some terribly sad sequences, one depicting dead being carried to burial, silhouetted against a peach-colored sky. Even this, however, shrieks out for something more spectacular, reminding us of the small screen’s limits in projecting enormity.

Written by Michael de Guzman and directed by Robert M. Young, “We Are the Children” is curiously uninvolving much of the time, mixing metaphors while chronicling mass death and a romance between Annie and Duffy as arid as the cracked earth beneath them.

Clashing tones are one problem. Another is that Danson and Sheedy share absolutely no chemistry. When he tells her, “What I am is nuts about you,” he sounds like he’s suffering from sun stroke. Sheedy is only slightly more convincing, often sounding like a petulant child, not a soldier serving humankind.

Meanwhile, presumably, the real suffering continues.