TV Reviews : Ordeal of Pioneer Woman in ‘River’

Set in frontier America in the 1750s, when Native Americans roamed free and white settlers were few and scattered, “Follow the River” is a satisfying family movie that insults neither children nor adults.

Dramatizing the ordeal of a coolly indomitable pioneer wife named Mary Ingles (the lustrous, defiant Sheryl Lee, who was Laura Palmer on “Twin Peaks”), the movie is extremely pictorial and reasonably even-handed in its depiction of Native Americans.

In this instance, Shawnee warriors sweep down on the protagonists’ family farm, capture the nine-months pregnant Ingles heroine, her 6-year-old son and sister-in-law and lead them on an arduous journey to a Shawnee encampment where they are to become slaves to the tribe.

Instead, despite running a boisterous tribal gauntlet of sticks and whips, life for the captives is not so bad after all.

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These Native Americans, understandably nervous about encroaching settlers, live in a beautiful forest of waterfalls and white-water rapids.

Here’s one of the seldom-seen portraits of the Native American idyll before outsiders ruined paradise.

The movie (finely lensed by Michael E. Gershman) was shot in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains and hints at epic/pastoral American painters whose art romanticized nature, such as 19th-Century naturalist Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school.

Giving a volatile lift to the cast is an older white captive woman (lively supporting player Ellen Burstyn) who bravely accompanies Ingles on her treacherous flight to freedom.

* “Follow the River” airs tonight at 9, on ABC, Channel 7.