An Honorable ‘Member of the Wedding’

Critics, I confess, often apply their severest standards to the most ambitious and admirable undertakings, not always expressing their gratitude that the thing was undertaken at all. It is an ironic compliment to the ambition of the work, but the compliment is a well-disguised blessing, and one the creators would generally be willing to do without.

So it is with the new television adaptation of Carson McCullers’ 1946 novel “The Member of the Wedding,” which comes to USA cable at 9 tonight.

As a play, it ran 501 performances after premiering on Broadway in January 1950, with Ethel Waters as the housekeeper, Berenice, and Julie Harris as 13-year-old Frankie Addams, coming of age with pain and unhappiness in 1944 Georgia. Waters and Harris repeated their roles in a fine 1952 film directed by Fred Zinnemann.

The newest version was written and produced by David W. Rintels and stars Alfre Woodard and Anna Paquin, with a beguiling newcomer, Corey Dunn, as Frankie’s 6-year-old cousin John Henry.

The production, ably directed by the veteran Fielder Cook, is in fact an ambitious and admirable undertaking, an uncommon gift to television viewers. It has been gently opened up to reflect the town and the wedding itself (after which Frankie insists she will join her GI brother and his bride on their honeymoon and in their later lives). Rintels has been painstakingly faithful to the spirit and text of McCullers’ work. The author’s words, heard voice-over, set the scene and conclude the story.

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And McCullers’ text, half a century later, still rings with a universal validity in its portrait of a bright, special, motherless girl at the brink of adolescence--a reluctant loner, partly angry, mostly frightened and uncertain about her prospects, her nature, even her sanity.

“I’ve always been an ‘I person,’ ” she says in one of McCullers’ insightful lines (even if it seems almost too literary and insightful for young Frankie). Her wish beyond all others to become a “We person” may well resonate with a lot of adolescents (and their elders, remembering).

The “yes, buts” about the film are real enough, but they have to be weighed against the virtues. As in much television drama, the images have a carefully lit, color-drenched quality, the vividness perhaps required for the small screen but engendering an impression of artifice rather than reality. The dialogue, often near-poetical and sounding more like the voice of the mature writer looking back, frequently suggests the printed page, or indeed the stage, and makes it difficult for the actors not to be perceived as actors acting.

Woodard copes with the challenge with great skill. She is younger than Waters was in the role and it makes this Berenice less a grandmother figure and more a near-contemporary, with a closer comprehension of Frankie’s emotional state. Her singing of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” (which Waters chose as the title of her autobiography) makes a rather stagy but touching scene.

Paquin, an Oscar winner for 1993’s “The Piano,” catches very well Frankie’s sudden veerings between raucous tomboy with dirty elbows and the woman-to-be impatient to get there. The accents of her native New Zealand have disappeared behind the accents of the Deep South. A little too deep (especially against Woodard’s more softly modulated language).

* “The Member of the Wedding” airs at 9 tonight and repeats Saturday at 10 p.m. on cable’s USA.