TV REVIEWS : Cronyn, Tandy Bring Luster to ‘Dance’

Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, America’s preeminent and ageless acting couple, weave a bittersweet tale of aging and the pain of letting go in “To Dance With the White Dog” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

One of the secrets to Cronyn and Tandy’s success and longevity (they’re both in their early 80s) is that, as a theatrical husband and wife, they’ve never fallen into the acting trap of self-importance. That is what distinguishes them from the inflated-performance style of another famous acting couple, Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt.

Here Cronyn and Tandy play the devoted Sam and Cora Peek, married 57 years. Suddenly, in a blink, Sam is a widower, left to tend after his pecan trees on a bum hip and to ward off the mother-hen assaults of his over-solicitous children and grandchildren.

Few stories could be better served by the co-stars than Southern novelist Terry Kay’s tender, evocative, semi-autobiographical book “To Dance With the White Dog” (1990). In its universal family resonances, set in the piney woods of Georgia, the book has been rightly compared to James Agee’s “A Death in the Family.”

The adaptation by Susan Cooper (who also co-wrote the 1987 TV movie “Foxfire” for Cronyn and Tandy) is earnest and strongest when it deals with Sam’s white dog. The stray animal, materializing from nowhere, is wonderfully suggestive of the return of his dearly departed Cora. That this most sublime, metaphysical part of the book is so faithfully rendered on network prime time is not to be lightly dismissed.

But as warm and appealing as Tandy and Cronyn are in this exotic variation of “On Golden Pond,” the movie is flawed--not because it’s not the book but because of a major misstep by producer-director Glenn Jordan. That is the excessive and disproportionate screen time given to Cronyn and Tandy’s two fussbudget, dim-headed, smothering daughters (Christine Baranski and Amy Wright). Their clownish demeanor and overplaying throws the fragile tone of the movie dangerously off balance.