TV Reviews : Kirk Douglas Shines in Dyslexia Drama

“The Secret,” starring Kirk Douglas, is about a grandfather and his grandson overcoming the self-imposed stigma of dyslexia (9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

That’s a socially useful theme--comparatively novel and perfectly tailored for the TV movie. Even First Lady Barbara Bush is going to appear at the end in a public-service announcement. But no movie theme, however portentous, is sufficient unto itself. What redeems the production is its gnarly, multilayered family relationships, its vivid sense of place (Nova Scotia serving as a Cape Cod fishing village) and its mellow, vulnerable performance by Douglas, who portrays a man grappling with a lifelong shame.

Douglas’ performance is autumnal-tinged, just like the fields of orange and yellow leaves and the fading sunlight on the beach that give this movie its luster.

His character, the popular owner of a general store, has a secret so personally humiliating--his inability to read or write--that he hides it from his son (Bruce Boxleitner), daughter-in-law (Laura Harrington) and notably his beloved 9-year-old grandson (a solid performance by Jesse R. Tendler). Only his best friend (Brock Peters) knows the truth.

Writer Cynthia A. Cherbak’s script cleverly expands on a seemingly untheatrical subject by investing it with the human masks worn by the victims of this silent affliction--in this case, the little boy faking an oral reading test in grade school, the grandfather feigning the perusal of a restaurant menu, the pair of them adrift on a subway train in Boston because they can’t read the signs.

And by dealing with the hereditary ramifications and making the grandson dyslexic, too, Cherbak sets up a dimensional familial struggle, waged in ignorance, shame and the fear of rejection.

The apogee of the drama is in director Karen Arthur’s tensely paced coming-to-terms dispute between the grandfather and his long-disaffected son as they haltingly have it out in the front seat of a panel truck. It’s this vibration that the non-dyslexics are affected, too, that give the story its breadth.