TV REVIEWS : ‘Sarah’: Scrappy Housemate on the Prairie

There was a time in our history when placing a personal ad in a newspaper was a reasonable and proper way to find a wife. Mail-order brides were born out of necessity. On a remote Kansas prairie in 1910, Glenn Close and Christopher Walken create a tremulous couple struggling to share a life in “Sarah Plain and Tall,” a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” movie airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8.

The story is based on the Newberry Medal-winning children’s book by Patricia MacLachlan, who co-wrote the teleplay with Carol Sobieski, and the theme is endurance. Close and Walken are disparate and stubborn, lonely people. Compromise comes hard for him. And she must fight a ghost once she answers an ad and leaves the Maine seashore to make a new life on a farm with a man who still grieves for his long dead wife.

“I didn’t reckon for this,” she confides to a neighbor.

Walken’s taciturn widower and Close’s gritty, upbeat stepmother are tintypes you might find in an old photo album. Central to the action is the woman’s acceptance by the father’s two children (Lexi Randall and Christopher Bell), who are flavorful characters. The little boy will charm your socks off.

Close, who had already recorded the book as an audiocassette, makes her executive producing debut with this picture. It’s really a labor of love, and the result is redolent of the Hallmark signature. The impact of the show, under producer/director Glenn Jordan, is its evocative hold on your senses. Cinematographer Michael Fash has a painterly eye.

Expanses of great green rolling plains ripple in breezes you can almost feel, marigolds and sunflowers jump at you from tall grass, a ferocious storm, like that other Kansas storm in “The Wizard of Oz,” tears the roof off the farm. A dome of sky envelopes the land, and outlined against it are picnics, swimming holes and sodbusters. It’s the classic pioneer story, based on an incident in the book author’s own family. There’s a stillness about it, too, that runs counter to most drama.