TV Reviews : ‘Stranger’ Takes Unwelcome Tact

Teri Garr, as the mother of an amnesiac teen-ager in the TV movie “Stranger in the Family,” gets this month’s Queen of Denial award. Finally informed by doctors that her 17-year-old son’s total loss of memory will be permanent, she reacts by taking the poor boy home, showing him old slides and repeating, “ Remember? “

This based-on-fact production (which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on ABC Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42)--unlike such forgettably dumb big-screen efforts as “Regarding Henry” and “Shattered”--takes a more serious approach to the temporal tragedy resulting from a bump to the brain. In so doing, it ends up as a fairly typical affliction-of-the-week TV film, in which not only the victim’s recovery but the family’s denial and stages of grief are worked through in predictable steps.

You might forgive Garr for coming off so irritating, since her character is shown to suffer an emotional breakdown in the process of refusing to accept that her once-vibrant son has become effectively mentally retarded after a minor car accident. This is a plausible reaction of a family member to such a trauma--but still, it’s no fun for the healthier-minded viewer to have to watch Garr repeatedly whine, interrupt and bicker with the medical professionals whose advice she disbelieves and rejects.

That’s not the only alienating dramatic mistake “Stranger in the Family” risks making: It opens right at the scene of the auto accident, so Neil Patrick Harris as the son never gets a chance to show us what he was like before his brain slate was wiped clean (except for some unrevealing home-video flashbacks later). As a result, the loss of his personality never registers as tragically with the audience as it does with the distraught family.

Harris does a fine, touching job of portraying “a 140-pound kid going through the terrible twos,” relearning everything from scratch, language and dressing habits included. His eyes computing and his mouth ajar, Harris is able to suggest childlike, low-level input taking place. But his believable performance can’t quite make “Stranger” a movie to remember.