TV Reviews : ‘Innocence’: Drama With Political Thrust

“American Playhouse” is not normally associated with characters ripping apart recent American foreign policy. But in an unusual shift to a docudrama format, the Cambodian/New England refugee/orphan story “Lethal Innocence” dives into advocacy drama tonight (9 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15).

On one level we’re in the leafy midst of a heartwarming Vermont drama about an entire town adopting Cambodian refugee children in the mid-1980s. At the same time, Bruce Harmon’s screenplay, through a feisty United Nations character played by Dubliner Brenda Fricker (of “My Left Foot” fame), excoriates “Nixon and Kissinger for waging secret wars and causing millions of deaths.”

Mind you, this is a fictional character blowing steam in a exchange with an uncomprehending housewife. But in a production that is otherwise based on actual events and carries the imprimatur of reality, the U.S. trashing, in dramatic terms, is stinging and persuasive.

The movie’s political thrust condemns the United States for its incursion into Cambodia and, in scenes eerily foreshadowing today’s international headlines, ridicules our support of the dreaded Khmer Rouge.

In a crucial introduction to the story, the opening three-minute, post-Vietnam news footage graphically rekindles the Khmer Rouge’s so-called “Killing Fields” genocide, historically setting the framework for the amber fields and personal story that follow.

The entitled “Lethal Innocence” is a reference to the hostile, guarded Cambodian boy (a convincing performance by non-professional actor and former Cambodian refugee Vathana Biv) who is the story’s central figure. It is a well-told, contemporary twist on America as a stressed-out melting pot.

Director Helen Whitney deftly negotiates a plot that crisscrosses between ravaged Cambodia and a village in the Berkshires (Lee, Vt.) that serves as the real town (Windsor, Vt.) celebrated in 1987 for rescuing Cambodian refugees from a Khmer Rouge detention camp along the Thai border.

But the production’s ultimate energy comes from a plucky trio of females who, mercifully, aren’t abused women-in-jeopardy: Blair Brown, as a noble but unsophisticated mother of two Cambodian refugees; Teresa Wright as a grandmother who befriends the moody Cambodian youth; and Fricker as a no-nonsense Englishwoman shepherding a group of orphans to the United States.