Pass the Tissues as ‘Mrs. Lambert’ Arrives

Tired of hate? Feel like a five-Kleenex movie? “Mrs. Lambert Remembers Love,” with captivating performances by Ellen Burstyn and Walter Matthau, won’t leave a tear-duct dry Sunday (at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8).

This is the kind of plot that theatrical movies won’t touch. The material is even rare for a network prime-time movie. It’s a character drama, and the characters are old people, plus a little kid--not exactly a high concept.

But this production breathes; it makes a burnished statement about aging (a nursing home scene is ripe with cinema verite grittiness), it’s an emotional cliffhanger, and Janet Heaney’s script, pulling out all the stops, calibrates the sentiment.

The plot is deceptively maudlin: An easily addled grandmother (Burstyn) raising a little boy is losing her memory. The Social Services Department comes snooping, and Grandma and her 9-year-old grandson hit the road, on the run from mindless civil servants and a venal relative and his dimestore girlfriend who want the old lady’s house and custody of the boy (a solid performance by Ryan Todd). A lovable, mildly eccentric old family confidant (Matthau) comes to their rescue.

And that doesn’t begin to describe the heavy stuff that concludes the drama in an operatic blizzard of joy and Angst.

Amazingly, the sentiment works, thanks to Burstyn’s shaded performance. She’s on the screen twice as much as Matthau, and anybody ever emotionally bundled up by a grandmother will relate to this survivor in her frayed coat and battered sedan. Charles Matthau, Walter’s son, directed for producers Robert Halmi, Sydney Pollack and Alan Jacobs.