TV REVIEW : ‘A Little Piece of Heaven’: A Nice Little Slice of Capra

“Is the moon full because it eats stars?” asks the developmentally disabled young girl in NBC’s “A Little Piece of Heaven” (at 9 tonight, Channels 4, 36 and 39).

That’s a natural fairy tale of a question for this heart-melting Christmas movie about a guardian “angel” (Kirk Cameron) who lives on a pig farm that he transforms into a patch of heaven for unwanted children.

While scenarist Betty Goldberg and director Mimi Leder have carefully woven a two- or three-hankie movie, the production is warmly touched with the tone of a Yuletide fable. There’s a bit of Charles Dickens here, with an impoverished orphanage and ragamuffin kids running from ominous authorities. But more than anything, the movie is a homage to the spirit of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (which we see playing on TV in the orphanage living room).

As endearingly played by Cameron (of “Growing Pains”), the prince of this story is a young man whose parents die, leaving him with a pig farm and an impaired sister with halting speech and a twisted gait (in a totally captivating and technically deft performance by Jenny Robertson).

In order to give his lonely sister a family and playmates at Christmas time, the brother brings home (“kidnaps” actually) two children from life’s scrap heap--one a street-wise, jive-talking urchin (Jussie Smollett) and the other a doleful, parentally battered girl (Lacey Chabert).

In the movie’s loveliest scene, Cameron lures the little girl out of her farmhouse at night as he stands outside her bedroom window dressed in these great angel’s wings that are lit up like a Christmas tree. Once at home, he goes to great lengths to persuade the children they are now angels in “heaven,” a word he has fancifully strung in gaudy lights above his farm.

None of this ever gets saccharine, and the disparate little family thrives until its secret gets out and state officials come running.

The obligatory ending, in chambers before a dour, white-haired judge and straight out of a 1930s movie, delivers a wonderfully improbable sentence. For all lovers of old movies, this really is how they used to make them.