TV REVIEW : ‘Miracle on I-880’ a Harrowing Docudrama

The most common fault with movies about natural disasters is their stereotypical characters. The comparative strength of “Miracle on I-880” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) is the focus on the two most agonizing personal nightmares triggered by the horrendous collapse of the I-880 freeway in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

“Miracle on I-880” is able to balance the physical horror of the 7.1 quake--a jarring 1 minute and 42 seconds of re-created freeway carnage 14 minutes into the story--with the human ordeals of the little brother and sister (Petra and Julio Beruman) who survived after their car was crushed on the double-decker interstate and of the much publicized longshoreman (Buck Helm) who was found alive in the front seat of his mangled car four days after the quake and came to symbolize the emotional pull of the events.

Shooting on a 300-foot-long mock-up of the freeway built in Vancouver, production designer Richard Hudolin and director Robert Iscove put you in the driver’s seat as the concrete starts to buckle. Car radios are tuned that Oct. 17 afternoon to the pregame Giant-A’s fanfare of the third game of the World Series. Suddenly a Jeep careens into another vehicle. A piece of rock glances off a windshield. Terror follows.

It’s a can’t-miss moment of action, first frozen and then wildly lurching through the hand-held lens of cinematographer Glen MacPherson.

When the dust settles and rescuers reach the two children (played by Jeffrey Licon and Ada Maris), the little boy’s leg has to be amputated on the spot and a female passenger’s dead body, pinning the boy down, can only be pried loose by severing it in two. The filmmakers don’t exploit these scenes but rather build up to them and then run like hell. Even so, the effect is wrenching, especially as we watch a buzz saw being hoisted up by a crane.

Writers Leo E. Arthur and Casey Kelly don’t entirely avoid the cliches of the genre, but with the troubled Helm family, they at least limit the sugarcoating. As the rescued longshoreman and last victim found alive (who hung on for 23 days before succumbing), Len Cariou catches the gritty melancholy of a dad whose wife (Sandy Duncan) had just kicked him out of the house. Among the father’s otherwise wholesome family is a wayward son and drug addict who secretly supplies the press with his dad’s photograph for a profit.

As a cautionary tale, one could almost ask what miracles? The entitled “miracles” here came at a terrible price.