A Family Lost--and Found

It’s a beautiful, sunny fall day in Westlake Village outside Los Angeles, where “Journey,” the latest “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation, is shooting at a rustic farmhouse built for the production. The air is fresh and crisp. Roosters are crowing. Dogs are barking. Horses are grazing.

And director Tom McLoughlin (“Take Me Home Again”) is shooting a scene in which the title character, Journey (Max Pomeranc), befriends a pregnant cat who has climbed into his bedroom.

Jason Robards and Pomeranc (“Searching for Bobby Fischer’) are petting the gray and white feline purring contentedly on the bed, oblivious to the crew, camera and hot lights.

“The cat has been consistently wonderful,” McLoughlin says, laughing. “We have been blessed with that one. When I read this, I said, ‘We are going to be doing this for days!’ But the cat has been dead on.”

“Journey” is from the pen of Patricia MacLachlan, who wrote “Sarah, Plain and Tall” and its sequel “Skylark,” two of the most acclaimed “Hallmark” films of the decade. Once again, MacLachlan has worked her poetic magic with “Journey.” Glenn Close, the star of “Sarah” and “Skylark,” is executive producer of the movie, which premieres Sunday night on CBS.

Journey is an 11-year-old boy who is trying to deal with the fact that his mother (Meg Tilly) walked out on him and his older sister (Eliza Dushku), leaving them in care of their loving grandparents, Marcus and Lottie (Robards and Brenda Fricker). The boy’s father abandoned the family early on.

Because Journey can’t understand the problems his mother had with Marcus, he blames his grandfather for his mother’s departure. As the gulf between Journey and Marcus widens, Marcus discovers photography is the key to bridge the gap between them.

Lunching in his trailer, Robards describes “Journey” as a “sweet” story. “It’s the old grandfather bit again,” the Tony- and Oscar-winner says with a hearty laugh.

Marcus, he says, begins shooting photos of everything and everybody because his daughter tore up all the family pictures before she left. “What he’s trying to do is recapture something for the kid and himself,” Robards explains. “That’s his way of dealing with [her leaving]. The boy deals with it in refusing to believe she won’t come back. He hates me more because I say, ‘She is never going to come back.’ ”

“Journey” never explains why Marcus and his daughter have clashed all their lives. Robards, a father of six, says he can’t identify with Marcus’ dilemma. “All kids are different,” he says. Some of his children “are very close [to me] and others go on their own and get their wings. But I don’t have any who have said, ‘I hate you. I won’t be around you.’ All my kids are on their own--and glad to be--and work. Even though there have been divorces and things, there has a been a terrific concern to have a solid home.”

Director McLoughlin, a “Sarah, Plain and Tall” fan, was drawn to MacLachlan’s script because it centers around a child.

“I have a real affinity for anything that empowers children,” he says. “I have two kids of my own and never growing up myself, I really love anything that gives a sense of childlike quality.”

“Journey,” he says, “really centers around a child in a very traumatic summer when his mother leaves. I thought it would be a really interesting challenge to try to show that through the child’s eyes and the eyes of a camera.”

To achieve the desired effect, McLoughlin shot Max as Journey on very long lenses, getting close “so you get a sense of getting into his mind. You come right in on his face. Max has such incredible reactions to things that are very, very fresh every time.”

Because the story is seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy remembering a painful period, “last names aren’t important, what year isn’t important. It’s just that time when you suddenly found out some really emotional truth in your life about your mother, about your grandfather, finding out what motherhood really means. From his relationship with an animal, he learns more about what a mother is than what he learned from his mother. He remembers his grandfather being this towering man.

“We have a lot of shots of him just framed in the window because that’s what he remembers, always looking out to see his mother come back down that road and, ultimately, coming to terms that he has a family, not just the family he expected to have.”

Though a child is the center of “Journey,” McLoughlin didn’t want to make a children’s movie. “It’s really a child’s world, but as an adult, I have tried to bring a sensibility to it that you, as an adult, can connect to all the pain and all the emotional roller-coaster rides that you go through [as a child]. This is a piece that kind of reflects: You find your family where you find it. You find love where you can.”

“Journey,” McLoughlin adds, is “really a Hallmark card with a pretty image and very simple truths inside. I would love to see it come out with that feeling.”

“Hallmark Hall of Fame’s Journey” premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.