TV Review : ‘Father for Charlie’: Gritty and Touching

The primary subject to emerge among original network movies this holiday season has been parents and their disaffected children, most of them renewing family bonds after long absences, emotional and otherwise.

What’s curious is the year-end gender pattern on the TV screen: Father and son dramas are in, mothers and daughters are out. The latest example is “A Father for Charlie,” a gritty Depression-era interracial story starring Louis Gossett Jr. as a dirt-poor farmer who becomes a savior/father figure to an abandoned white boy in the rutty, steamy Ozarks of 1932 America.

It follows such recent NBC Christmas movies as Truman Capote’s “One Christmas,” with Henry Winkler as a New Orleans absentee father greeting his skeptical 8-year-old son, and “Take Me Home Again,” an adult father-son coming-of-age saga that paired Kirk Douglas with Craig T. Nelson unburying their lost love on a jaunty cross-country trip.

These are each essentially unsentimental movies in which the difficulty of a father and son to say “I love you” is the common thread binding them all.

What earmarks “A Father for Charlie” (airing New Year’s Day evening on CBS) is its unflinching edginess, violence and heated atmosphere wrought by director Jeff Bleckner from a script by H. Haden Yelin. The writer turns material that appears to be dangerously fraught with sentiment and gives it thrust and life.

Of course, you must suspend disbelief that the only black man within 40 miles in cracker country could befriend and take in a desperate ragamuffin of a white kid (exceptionally played by Joseph Mazzello) in a town drenched in racism. But young Mazzello’s growth and transformation is skillful enough that it should propel many viewers to reach for a couple of Kleenex.

But it’s Gossett’s rock-ribbed survivor and long-suffering farmer, who’s already lost his wife and own son to Klan violence, who carries the movie with his staunch pride.

Surprisingly, the production’s most startling performance, however, belongs to Don Swayze, as the young boy’s scraggly, bitter father. Swayze takes a cliche yahoo role and creates a terrifying child beater who learned to be one, he says, in one of his rages, “from my old man.”

* “A Father for Charlie” airs Sunday on Channel 2, 9-11 p.m.