TV REVIEWS : ‘Perfect Tribute’ Taps Civil War Emotions

We are still wallowing in Maj. Sullivan Ballou’s last love letter to his wife and the whole national melancholia over “The Civil War.” Now a new ABC movie, “The Perfect Tribute,” airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, stabs perfectly into the heart of the same emotions.

This isn’t the stuff of docudrama, but there are enough elemental truths in it to elevate the gentle fable that’s been fashioned out of the Civil War horrors.

Thirteen-year-old Young Ben (Lukas Haas) learns that his older brother Carter (Campbell Scott), a captain in the Confederate Army, has been wounded at Gettysburg and is being held in a Yankee hospital. Ben leaves Atlanta intent on freeing Carter. Along the desperate journey, he wrestles with death and destruction.

The parallel story is Abraham Lincoln (Jason Robards) preparing to visit the battlefield and help dedicate the burial grounds. After the thunderous oratory by Edward Everett (Jose Ferrer), Lincoln’s two grand minutes dedicated to the honored dead is met by awed silence--a perfect tribute.

In the carefully crafted mood of the movie, we can easily make the logical leap when, on the next day in Washington City, Ben needs a lawyer to write the dying Carter’s will and happens across Lincoln, strolling along in deep meditation.

Neither brother recognizes this amiable man but, as Ben reads aloud the Gettysburg Address from the newspaper’s coverage, the Southern boys begin to understand and relish the magnificent sentiments in the words--another perfect tribute.

Dennis Brown wrote the screenplay, his first, from a 1905 short story by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. Instead of restirring the polemics of war, he relates the essential humanity of these three people. In the collaborative art, Dorothea Petrie executive produced, with special tribute (that word again) to director David Bender, cinematographer Thomas Burstyn, costumer Joe Tompkins and particularly Ben Edwards for quite magical production design.

They, together with a quite affecting cast, are unlikely to leave many eyes dry. For an old, old war that wasn’t very much fun, that’s a tribute.