TV Reviews : ‘Finding the Way Home’ Gets Lost on the Road

ABC’s “Finding the Way Home” loses its own way in relating a soft, sluggish story about an aging businessman who anguishes over his empty life, only to find renewal amid a community of poor Latino farm workers. It airs at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42.

George C. Scott is Max Mittelmann, a small-town hardware store owner whose business and marriage (in that order of importance, apparently) are floundering, filling him with sadness, anxiety and confusion.

Clearly, there are no more smiles in his life.

A curious device in Scott Swanson’s script (based on a novel by George Raphael Small) sends Mittelmann, suffering from amnesia, into a migrant farm community.

It is here--befriended by camp leader Ruben Lazarado (Hector Elizondo) and his widowed sister-in-law, Elena (Julie Carmen)--where he regains his self-respect as a local handyman, ensuring predictable resolution of his plight.

Scott gives a decent effort, but the dour Mittelmann hardly seems worth our concern, and his wife, Arlene (Beverly Garland), is so vaguely written that one couldn’t care less if the two of them ever reunite.

And as Ruben, the character here with the most potential, Elizondo is victimized by U-turns in the plot that reach a dead end.

Meanwhile, director Rod Holcomb seems unable to exert much control over the pace of this story: It moves so slowly at times that you feel you’re the one suffering amnesia.