TV REVIEW : ‘Lost Language’ Gives a Candid Portrayal of Homosexual Love

These may be trying times at PBS but the network, unflinching, is airing what is probably prime-time television’s most candid portrayal of homosexual love and lust in the compelling true-life drama “The Lost Language of Cranes,” on “Great Performances” tonight (at 10 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15).

Just two days after the public-television network announced that reduced funding has compelled reductions in the number of future episodes of “Great Performances,” among other programs, PBS comes out firing with a movie that the other networks reportedly turned down.

It’s easy to see why. However honest and affecting it is, the BBC production is sure to test the hidden biases of much of straight America while sending homophobics, closet and otherwise, into cardiac arrest.

But this movie, based on New York author David Leavitt’s acclaimed autobiographical novel, never sentimentalizes nor exploits its material. The hallmark of the BBC production, which has shifted the novel’s locale from Manhattan to London, is its unflappable tone.

Depending on your point of view, the sex, however dramatically necessary, may be a stretch for TV, but it looks as dumb as most sex on TV. Director Nigel Finch and adapter Sean Mathias, for example, dramatize love scenes between men in bed with the same ferocious kissing and physical cliches that you find in heterosexual love scenes all the time.

Ultimately, this movie is not about sex. It’s about the withering effect of secrets clasped too long. Quietly, but not without travail, the characters come to terms with themselves and each other.

Central to the plot is the comparatively calm coming out before his parents of an ordinary young man (Angus MacFadyen) whose honesty, in turn, triggers the anguished coming out of his ordinary father (Brian Cox, as the story’s bookish centerpiece, who habitually makes sorties to the neighborhood porno cinema to pick up men).

The most sympathetic character is the wife and mother (the mesmerizing Eileen Atkins), straight as an arrow and fantasizing--who can blame her?--her own little tete-a-tete with a tweedy colleague. To watch her riveting eyes open wide as she begins to untangle the family web is to see the dawning of light.

As for that puzzling title, it’s the movie’s visual motif--a huge construction crane swaying high in the sky. Nearby, a little boy watches and copies the language of the crane, stretching out his arms like a giant bird, communicating, as it were, in a coded language all his own--precisely the insular, secret language that all these people live and suffer by.