TV REVIEW : Sequel Puts Statement Before Interest

Adventure movies don’t often deal with anti-climaxes, and “Lawrence of Arabia” didn’t dwell long on T.E. Lawrence’s post-warrior life, for obvious reasons. Still, there’s a certain depressing fascination in the clean-up after a battle, and in the mire of bureaucracy that follows any large-scale action.

The unofficial sequel “A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia” (airing as part of PBS’ “Great Performances” tonight at 9 on KPBS Channel 15 and at 8 on KVCR Channel 24) is a small-scale drama that picks up where the wide-screen epic left off--with Lawrence facing off against his greatest foes: the politicians and diplomats.

It’s an equally worthy subject for dramatization, given that the dividing-up of the Arab world by the English-speaking nations in smoke-filled rooms set the stage for the messy Middle East that we have today.

This two-hour telefilm centers around the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, in which Lawrence tried in vain to force his country to keep its promise to install his comrade, the Emir Feisal (played by Siddig el Fadil), as King of Syria, instead of handing it over to the French. The hero’s powerlessness amid the different rules of this new, polite battlefield is a most frustrating impotence.

But despite its intriguingly tragic overtones, “A Dangerous Man” somehow makes Lawrence less, not more, of an interesting character as he loses his power. Ralph Fiennes looks infinitely younger than Peter O’Toole did in the same role, and, although that’s no doubt intentional (amazingly, Lawrence was just 29 at the time), Fiennes seems more like a brash, sensitive, sweaty-browed college lad than someone with the charisma to have successfully just led a foreign army through battle.

And, although the movie makes implications about how his newfound celebrity might have affected Lawrence, there’s little effort to get inside his psychology, except for the repeated notation that he was an illegitimate child and a couple of fleeting references to his apparent asexuality.

In one late scene, he spurns a comely woman who’s commandeered his bed; soon after, he gives an unlikely and embarrassingly written soliloquy in front of an Arab friend about how “it must be all the unborn children that make our flesh itch.” Moments like these seem like token personal touches in the face of scripter Tim Rose Pierce’s overridingly political themes, which are, of course, sharply anti-colonialist.

It makes sense that this part of Lawrence’s life would be done for the small screen; locked out of the corridors of power, he was, in effect, a smaller person. But even in bureaucratic defeat he must have still had an epic psyche, the scope of which is only skirted while director Christopher Menaul plays up the more predictable good-vs.-evil, white-vs.-Arab conflicts.