‘Lily Dale’ Withers in Face of Conflict

Everything in director Peter Masterson’s film version of Horton Foote’s play “Lily Dale” on Showtime is saturated in an unrelieving, dull brownness--from Don Fauntleroy’s weak, sepia-toned cinematography to the hazy, lazy nature of Foote’s dramaturgy.

Just as it did onstage, this curiously pallid work from an usually interesting writer just sits there, raising the mystery of why it’s here at all.

It isn’t as if “Lily Dale” is a cryptic, metaphoric piece of Southern gothic. Foote’s tale is pure simplicity, showing the fleeting reunion of brother Horace (Tim Guinee) with sister Lily Dale (Mary Stuart Masterson) and their mother Corella (Stockard Channing). After her first husband died a drunkard, Corella remarried, to Pete, whom the children call Mr. Davenport (Sam Shepard).

Pete is also Mr. Individualism, emphatic that Horace live on his own and fend for himself. (He doesn’t even seem to want to acknowledge Horace’s existence, for the foggiest of reasons.) So when Pete returns unexpectedly early to the family’s Houston home from an out-of-town trip while Horace is still there, a clash is bound to happen.

The clash, alas, is more like a whimper. Horace lapses into a fever that makes him bedridden for three weeks and a passive audience for spoiled Lily’s nonstop, self-absorbed monologues. No one in the well-to-do house bothers to call a doctor to examine Horace--just one of several instances where Foote’s search for ways to dramatize existential ideas collides with credibility.

Horace’s fate appears wrapped in the past with his dead father, but Lily wants nothing to do with the past, happy to tinkle the piano ivories and look pretty for her suitor (John Slattery). Foote never finds a way to bring this sibling rift to a head; it’s as if the film, like the family, were afraid of conflict.

None of this is good for the actors, who fail to meld into an ensemble. Masterson suggests a wallflower who’s been cooped up too long but misses the air of sadness Foote seems to be aiming at. Guinee, all manic-depressive angst, and Shepard, who’s never been more sternly taciturn, are acting in two different films. Only Channing finds moments of irony and honest reflection here, willing some glimpses of color into this dusty, brown story.

* “Lily Dale” airs at 10 p.m. Sunday on Showtime.