TV REVIEW : ‘Last’: Pain of a Marriage Breaking Up

Anyone who has a hard time watching old family movies because of a shattered marriage and divorce will appreciate the emotional pain and the fleeting nature of love in “The Last to Go” (at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, barring preemption for war coverage).

“Life is a wire,” says Tyne Daly, quoting the father of the high-flying Wallendas. The high-wire act in William Hanley’s teleplay (based on the book by Rand Richards Cooper) is family life itself. Here, at first, it’s like the cover of Home & Garden. Daly plays the middled-aged wife of a successful surgeon and mother of three children whose complacency turns to helpless rage when, after 22 years, her husband abandons her for a young nurse.

The production, framed in flashback and shot in soft light, is almost shot down in the first hour with an egregious subplot about the wife’s suppressed sexual attraction to a rugged gardener in scenes so hokey they’re almost comical. But once the yard man is out of the way, marital problems in bed lead to some credible drama.

Terry O’Quinn, as the decent but hapless husband who falls out of love with his wife, catches the quiet turmoil of the character’s dishonesty. Particularly well-defined in a story spanning a generation is the effect of the divorce on the teen-aged life and adulthoods of the couple’s three children (Annabeth Gish, Tim Ransom and Sarah Trogger).

The script is bloated, overloaded with plot and struggles with a bumpy structure, but there are redemptions. And producer-director John Erman draws a poignant characterization from Daly as the ex-wife who can’t let go.