‘Dad,’ ‘Immediate Family’ Resemble TV at Its Worst

In an interview recently, director Amy Heckerling used Goethe’s phrase, “What has not burst forth from your own soul will not refresh you,” as she described her impulse to make the current hit film “Look Who’s Talking.” In that particular case, the baby’s-eye-view-movie emerged after the birth of her first child.

It’s a heartening thing to hear, especially since it runs so entirely contrary to the way movies are conceived these days. As we get movies built to marketing department specifications, we’re also seeing films that are indistinguishable from television--not its high end but its dreary middle-ground. It’s a feeling that’s heightened when “Immediate Family” and “Dad” open in the same week.

Not all television is constricted and prosaic; no one would say that in a decade that has seen Dennis Potter’s imagination run to its fullest; that has given us such miniseries as “War and Remembrance,” or “Lonesome Dove.” On a regular basis, we have (or have had) “Murphy Brown,” “Hill Street Blues,” “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” “Frank’s Place,” “thirtysomething” and “The Wonder Years” to keep us absorbed on a regular basis.

It still leaves too many episodic television shows that are suffocatingly small-minded--in their horizons, their superficiality and their notion of what real life or real people are all about. What’s disheartening is when feature films, which are supposed to have a metaphoric depth of field as well as a literal one, begin to take on the look and sound of the worst of this kind of TV.

“Dad,” which was originally a novel by “Birdy’s” William Wharton, has been Simonized into screen form by a writer-director, Gary David Goldberg, whose success came with “Family Ties.” Most of the changes he’s made have been in planing away details that might seem peculiar or foreign to mass audiences: a hero, for example, who was an expatriate painter settled happily in France with a French wife. He’s been transformed into an image that television audiences recognize on sight: an overstressed executive (Ted Danson) who’s lost touch with his family.

“Dad” does contain a frightening portrayal of the sudden disintegration of personality that can come with age, and especially in the first section of the film, Jack Lemmon’s Dad is flawless. But as the film builds, it builds TV-cute, with adorable, sketch-like solutions to Dad’s problems and the kind of inane conclusion that ends half-hour sitcoms: over-hearty laughter by a newly unified family.

At the wake that ends the film, Olympia Dukakis, Lemmon’s prickly, unneighborly wife, puts on her dead husband’s baseball cap and adopts his outgoing mannerisms--as though personality traits of more than 70 years could be erased away.

Most of the things that made “Dad” singular as a novel have been pared away to make the finished product inoffensive. With another current product, “Immediate Family,” there was nothing in Barbara Benedek’s original screenplay to pare; it’s already perfect for the tiny screen.

The theme should be wrenching: the childlessness of a secure mature couple, the unwanted pregnancy of a young teen-ager who chooses to have her baby adopted. But even as director Jonathan Kaplan follows both adoptive parents (Glenn Close and James Woods) through their demoralizing fertility procedures or over even more infuriating adoption hurdles, the film making seems TV-careful. You get an awful lot of “acting” for your money here: poses, ruefulness, smiling through tears. (The exception is the guileless realism of Mary Stuart Masterson’s young mother.)

The predictability of this screenplay is absolutely crushing. Checking out the adoptive family’s house, the young pregnant mother says yearningly that it would be nice if her baby’s crib was put near the window, because down in the yard is a tree that’ll be covered with flowering blossoms in the spring. Guess the film’s last image.

Anything that might make this safe vehicle veer one jot away from expectation has been avoided. Moviegoing this routine is less than no challenge, it’s enervating. What we really lose, as drama gets this devalued, is ambiguity, ellipses, poetry.

The worst of television drama works on the principal of telling us what it’s going to say, saying it, then telling us it has said it. The best film never says what it’s going to show; shows it obliquely and assumes that we’ve been quick enough to pick up on it. One method is insulting, the other is flattering. Who wouldn’t rather be flattered?

Standard television drama moves in one straight line with nothing going on under that line to distract or to confuse an audience. It gives you the melody; it leaves out the left hand. It’s constructed to survive with every plot-point intact in spite of side-trips to the refrigerator or friendly telephone calls.

In the race to get a story told with every possible economy, details of character, of period, of place are jettisoned. They don’t advance the plot, they seem to be irrelevant; all they do is deepen and enrich the soil. They make characters you carry around for years afterwards.

Think of Jane Fonda in “Klute,” giving that bit of excess cat food a trial lick. The tennis serve of Monsieur Hulot. The silent scene in “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” as Meg Ryan attacks a stack of letters, popping them into the mail slot, one at a time, and peering into the box after each one. Ted Danson, as an assistant D.A. in “Body Heat,” dancing all by himself in the dark on the end of a pier with an image of Fred Astaire in his head that he can’t forget. Treat Williams, swinging insinuatingly on the door of his convertible as he tries to lure Laura Dern away from her house in “Smooth Talk.” Amy Wright in “Accidental Tourist,” filing her groceries alphabetically and, for that matter, that entire turtle-like clan of hers with their grand eccentricities.

Films engage us by their unexpected turns; we respond to their poetry, not their predictability. Look at the films turning up on some of those decade’s-best lists: “Raging Bull,” “Wings of Desire,” “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial,” “Blue Velvet,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Fanny and Alexander,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Platoon,” “Shoah,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Road Warrior,” “Local Hero.” In an era of encroaching timidity, you could call their overall motto “safety last.” More power to it.