TV REVIEWS : ‘No Children’ Role Takes Oprah to Projects

We tend to forget about Oprah the actress. Before America fell in love with Oprah the talk-show host, there was Oprah’s vivid performance as Sofia in the movie “The Color Purple.” But after the popularity of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” how does Oprah disappear into another character and make you forget who she is?

The answer is that she can’t, but if the story material is textured enough, it doesn’t matter that much. And it’s texture--the gangs, grime, poverty, damp floors and concrete blocks of an urban war zone--that informs Winfrey’s burnished, gritty “There Are No Children Here” on ABC Sunday (9 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

In her most serious role since “Color Purple,” Winfrey plays the real-life, down-but-not-out single mother LaJoe Rivers. She’s a woman who could easily be a guest on Oprah’s talk show--a determined person who fiercely wages war on behalf of her kids from a squalid apartment in the Chicago projects otherwise known as the Henry Horner Homes.

Adapted by Bobby Smith Jr. from the acclaimed 1991 best-selling book by Wall Street Journal reporter Alex Kotlowitz, the drama focuses on the fearsome odyssey of LaJoe’s welfare mom and her two sons, 9-year-old Pharoah (the remarkably winning Norman Golden II) and 11-year-old Lafeyette (debuting actor Mark Lane, who was plucked out of a children’s casting call).

It’s the youths’ shattering story, anchored to a glimmer of hope, that propels the drama (which was personally witnessed by Kotlowitz, who spent two years virtually living with the Rivers family).

Shot on location at the ravaged Horner Homes ghetto, director Anita W. Addison doesn’t flinch from the requisite violence but she doesn’t exploit it either. There are four separate incidents in which pistol shots rend the air, including one hair-raising moment as bullets crash into the Rivers’ apartment as they fly for cover.

A cautionary note: While this movie should be viewed as a socially redeeming family movie, complete with a look-to-the-dawn intoning by the Rivers’ earthy grandmother (played by poet-novelist Maya Angelou), this production is no walk in the park. Parents watching with impressionable children should be forewarned of one graphic elementary school-yard gangland shooting, so realistically staged by Addison that it looks like a censored outtake from some city’s gruesome nightly newscast.

When LaJoe Rivers exclaims “We might be poor, but we ain’t sellin’ our soul to the devil today,” you know it’s a voice meant for Oprah. And for the lives of children who have to grow up way before their time.