TV Reviews : ‘Wizard’ on Channel 28 Evokes WWII America

Small-town, World War II America is evoked with exceptional fidelity tonight in “The Wizard of Loneliness” from “American Playhouse” (at 9 on Channels 28 and 15).

The atmosphere--green Lucky Strike packs on the outfield fences and stars in the windows for sons lost in the war--is redolent of old Saturday Evening Post covers. But this coming-of-age odyssey (featuring Lukas Haas, the wide-eyed youngster in the movie “Witness”) is brushed with darkness. There’s something out of kilter in this town that would chill Norman Rockwell.

The New England hamlet here (the movie was shot in Bristol, Vt.) is both golden and moody. The latter reinforces the difficult and quirky adjustments that wartime has forced upon this town and our young central character.

We meet him on a wartime train as he’s being lurched from Los Angeles to live with relatives in Vermont. Like a wizard, the lonely youth fantasizes retributions on people he can’t stand as events unfold through his cynical eyes.

Haas invests this sullen, precocious 12-year-old with an odd magnetism. His grandfather and aunt are endearingly rendered by John Randolph and Lea Thompson.

The ultimate meltdown of the boy’s disdain for his new life is prompted by the grandfather’s patience and the boy’s startling relationship with a strange, war-crazed soldier who stalks the town and youth’s family.

Jenny Bowen’s direction and Nancy Larson’s two-hour screenplay (based on the 1965, semi-autobiographical novel by John Nichols) is fine when it deals with the boy’s relationship to his relatives, but the story falters badly with its hovering subplot concerning the mad soldier. The bedeviled character’s situation is absolutely implausible, especially since he eludes everyone for a whole year.

“American Playhouse” co-produced “The Wizard of Loneliness” two years ago as a theatrical film. But it was barely seen by audiences. The production deserved better, and now it’s back. So is “American Playhouse,” which started the season with two bombs, but is on track here.