TV REVIEWS : ‘Hostages’ Relives Terrorist Drama

“Hostages” (premiering at 8 tonight on HBO) plunges you into the dank, vermin-infested cells of Lebanon where six civilians (a curious assortment of journalists and teachers) held the world’s attention as prisoners of Hezbollah terrorists from the mid-1980s to the release of the last prisoner (Terry Anderson) in late 1991.

The first dramatization of the kidnapings that fueled public ire in America and Britain, the production duly records Western refusal to deal with the terrorists while illuminating the activist role of the prisoners’ families fighting against the indifference of their own governments.

The political story deftly employs newsreel footage of the period (including President Ronald Reagan scoffing that Terry Anderson’s videotaped Christmas message reminded him of the days when he read scripts too). And while the Muslim kidnapers manacle, brutalize and drive the hostages to the edge, the script by Bernard MacLaverty takes an unusually evenhanded look at the captors, carefully dramatizing the motives for their hatred of the United States and Israel.

But the world drama outside the human one remains a muddle. The victims’ assorted sisters and girlfriends working official circles on behalf of their loved ones are such a blur that they become almost interchangeable (Kathy Bates and Natasha Richardson among them).

Meanwhile, the heart of the movie, shot in Israel, Beirut and England, is how the hostages overcame a “crucifying aloneness . . . a silent, screaming slide into the bowels of ultimate despair,” as the Irish hostage, Brian Keenan (exceptionally played by Ciaran Hinds), says at the end.

Director David Wheatley catches their rudimentary games of survival (science quizzes and squashing cockroaches) with humor and economy. Their alternating releases to freedom are hasty and confusing, as they were in reality. But however terribly scarred, the hostages emerge into the public glare as unyielding and heroic figures.