TV Reviews : ‘Hope’ Threatened by Hackneyed Plot

The family drama “A Season of Hope” is so plodding and predictable that the movie’s real attraction is its agrarian setting--lemon groves, of all things, in peril from a citrus disease.

The groves are at least nostalgic, conjuring up visions of an L.A. popularized by those bygone postcards, when the city seemed like one gigantic citrus farm.

The setting here is contemporary, however, and, unfortunately, the threatened crops and the human crises bedeviling the family that harvests these lemons are pretty hackneyed.

The wife and husband (the anxiously cheerful JoBeth Williams and the glowering Stephen Lang) are barely talking to each other. To make matters graver, the teen-age son (Jeremy London) doesn’t want to wind up growing lemons like his old man and angrily flees the hearth. As if this isn’t enough, a grandfather (the wise and wily Ralph Waite), who 30 years earlier dumped his wife and children to spend his life at sea, has now returned a little late to patch things up with his resentful son.

Waite, with his crackly grin, is burdened with a cliche role as a family fixer-upper and savior, but he’s so convincing and affable that he’s the one reason to look at the movie. * “A Season of Hope” airs 9-11 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).