TV Reviews : An Ambivalent View of the ‘Mamas and the Papas’

It’s hard to know whether to take “The Story of John Phillips and the Mamas and the Papas: Straight Shooter” (Sunday at 10:30 p.m. on Channel 28) as loving musical flashback or cautionary drug tale. Mostly, it’s just a low-key, garden-variety video documentary with absolutely no point of view, though anyone who ever swooned westward to the sounds of “California Dreamin’ ” will probably find its vintage performance footage and new interview material interesting in fits and starts.

In a rare analytical moment toward the end, the unseen narrator does tell us that “the life and times of John Phillips represent all that was good and bad about the ‘60s.” The good, of course, was the Mamas and the Papas’ adoption of sublime, clear-cut folk harmony into a counterculture context, hep and hippie-ish enough for the Monterey Pop Festival but square enough for “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

But, as said narrator recalls, “the ‘70s would not be kind to John.” Actually, it’s more like John not being kind to John, with the quartet’s 1968 breakup followed by a slide into heroin addiction (not to mention “10,000 Quaaludes over three or four years”). A doctor at a detox hospital recalls that a gaunt Phillips came in “in such terrible shape that it was questioned from time to time whether he could walk to the cafeteria to eat.”

The comeback isn’t entirely inspirational: Phillips kicked the habit not so much out of love for family or self as the fact that he was facing a possible 45 years in prison for possession. Yet credit him for eventually accepting the “domino effect” of his addiction on his alarmed but nonetheless likewise drug-riddled family: “They all want your attention and all want to emulate your behavior,” he remembers being told.

Director Mark Hall doesn’t know all the ropes of documentary film making--by plunging right into Phillips’ childhood history at the start, he ensures plenty of instant channel switching--but did find the right people (from John Stewart to Dick Clark) to interview. And he may have inadvertently uncovered a Dorian Gray story: In a saga full of balding heads and double chins, former Mama Michelle Phillips--more than two decades after their last chart success--looks far younger now, as if about to regress into puberty.