TV Review : An Unsettling Blair Brown Buoys ‘Extreme Close-Up’ on NBC

The era of the flashback in movies may be coming to an end. Characters need no longer retreat within themselves and silently reminisce; instead, for better or worse, directors can now sit them down in front of a VCR and show them watching their own old home videos.

“Extreme Close-Up” (tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39) operates out of a potentially gimmicky premise--that its troubled 17-year-old protagonist, who is almost Oedipally obsessed with his recently deceased mother, will learn something startling about both her life and his from wading through the stacks of family videotapes he shot in happier times. The mother, played by Blair Brown, is already dead as the film begins and is seen only as the boy worshipfully studies her VHS image. It has the potential to turn into an unwitting pilot for “America’s Most Maudlin Home Videos.”

This riveting film, though--created by several members of the “thirtysomething” team--transcends its novelty with almost shocking emotional clarity and believable revelations both big and small. As the teen-aged would-be documentarian sticks another tape in the deck and “Close-Up” shifts from the glossiness of film stock to the immediacy of videotape, it’s as chilling for us as it is for him to watch these past events unfold so texturally close yet so far away.

At first, Brown is seen only as preternaturally vibrant, the world’s most hip and cheerful mom. Soon, though, in these flashbacks we see the intimations of an unbalanced personality that the children bore witness to but were usually encouraged to deny by Dad, Craig T. Nelson. The boy, Morgan Weisser, is expected to have worked through his grief, but he’s increasingly haunted by the idea that he might be all too much like his mother--whose tortured psyche he hasn’t begun to understand.

Part of what makes “Extreme Close-Up” so unusually perceptive is the way that characters come to understand how each other ticks in small and meaningful ways well before the climax, but then go on to behave selfishly or protectively for a while yet anyway, just like in life.

Brown’s performance is a brilliantly unsettling anchor, as she goes from supermom into some mostly suggested scary shifts. Weisser and Samantha Mathis, as a girl he befriends at school, make for two of the most credible teens you’re likely to see adults dream up. Director Peter Horton (co-star and occasional director on “thirtysomething”) and scenarist/executive producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (of the same show) have done TV proud again with the kind of close-up that could only work on the small screen.