TV REVIEWS : Lost-and-Found Love in ‘Jane’s House’

In a surgical departure from his characteristically tense screen persona, James Woods is virtually unrecognizable as a recovering, melancholy widower fitfully raising two kids and taking a second chance on love and marriage in “Jane’s House” (Sunday night at 9, Channels 2 and 8).

Attractively teamed with Anne Archer as a chic sports marketing executive who revives the widower’s lost romantic impulses, Woods catches the uncertainty, selfishness and subtle weakness of an ordinary, endearing father bringing a new woman into the house one year after the death of his first wife (the entitled Jane, whose off-screen presence even in death is palpable).

Rather than stooping to easy, predictable melodrama befalling a new wife confronted by two hostile children, co-producer and director Glenn Jordan weaves a fragile tone into Eric Roth’s tremulous teleplay (adapted from a novel by Robert Kimmel Smith).

The picture, shot in Vancouver but set in leafy, upper-middle-class Long Island, is quietly expressive and redolent of warm neighbors, a living room wedding, touch football games on the front lawn and surviving children coping, like dad, with painful loss. Especially convincing in her hurtful spite is Missy Crider’s beleaguered teen daughter. As the sweetly forlorn younger brother, Keegan MacIntosh is much more credible here than in CBS’ other movie about family strife (see accompanying review).

Anchored to themes of traumatic change and requisite compromise, the real drama in “Jane’s House” involves Archer’s over-accommodating stepmother, who gradually begins to lose all sense of herself. Archer never overplays the hand of an outsider who finally, like mending broken crockery, flashes the anger and instinctual self-preservation that salvages the marriage.

She presses upon Woods’ naively complacent husband the hard lesson that he can’t relive the past by wedging her into it and should have moved her into a brand-new house in the first place. In a nice climactic touch, we cut to moving men carrying out household plants.

This is a curious prime-time movie insofar as so little appears to be happening on its surface. But it should connect with anyone adjusting to loss and the giddy explosion of newfound horizons.

Good Intentions Go Awry in ‘Aaron’

A drama about mental illness, “For Love of Aaron” (tonight at 9, Channels 2 and 8), may not be everyone’s cheery idea of gearing up for the New Year.

And Meredith Baxter’s fierce, overwrought and mannered performance as a wildly unstable divorced mom, whose tense eyeballs always appear on the verge of springing from her head, is both grueling and hangover-inducing for those on the mend from last night, not to mention football. You would never think this is the same actress who was so convincing as that other troubled wife, Betty Broderick.

Based on the true-life demons and ultimate recovery of author Margaret Gibson, the production is a case of good intentions gone awry. Gibson’s treatment of her personal ordeal (adapted for TV by Peter Silverman) is so cloying in its depiction of a semi-crazed mother emotionally and physically dependent on her young son that it’s difficult to maintain empathy for either one of them, let alone the boy’s estranged, insensitive father (Nick Mancuso) who blithely describes his ex-wife as a “freak.” Even Mancuso looks uncomfortable playing this stiff knucklehead.

For that matter, the little boy, the entitled Aaron (a near beatific Keegan MacIntosh) has, understandably, serious problems of his own. Primary is his reliance on an imaginary playmate he calls Grover, a stuffed toy for whom Mom provides chirpy voice-over in puppet-like moments that are more weird than lovable.

It’s all too much. Crucially missing is any viable background or psychiatric insight to Gibson’s mental dilemma. We never get inside her or understand why she’s forever brushing her hair.

John Kent Harrison’s direction, oddly enough, is better in the supporting roles (John Kapelos’ doctor, Malcolm Stewart’s lawyer and Blu Mankuma’s social worker).

In the final 15 minutes, much too late to salvage the show, the movie veers into the mother’s involving child custody case, climaxed when the acclaimed author and by-now-heroine delivers an avant-garde poem that consumes a full minute of broadcast time and sounds inspired by Dylan Thomas--a nice, daring literary touch for TV drama.

Executive producer Marian Rees, whose judgment is normally unerring, arguably made a mistake in letting Gibson write the autobiographical treatment. More distance, not a mirror-closeness, seemed needed.