This ‘Picnic’ Can’t Match the Layers of the Original

Every once in a while, a movie remake is so awful that it leaves a sort of bad taste in your brain. The only remedy is to immediately revisit the original, to rinse away the bad and restock the good.

So, if curiosity gets the better of you, and you tune in to the remake of “Picnic” airing Sunday on CBS, be sure to keep a copy of William Inge’s 1953 play handy, or a tape of the iconic William Holden-Kim Novak film. You’re gonna need ‘em.

Inge’s drama--about a virile young drifter who blows into a rural Kansas town and sets passions boiling--is a cautionary tale about the quick passing of youth and opportunity, about cycles of mistakes and squandered lives, and about the eternal struggle between animal instinct and prudish, civilizing restraint.

To judge by what they’ve put on screen, the folks involved in the remake understand none of this. Seeing merely the onion skin, not the layers underneath, producer Blue Andre, screenwriter Shelly Evans and director Ivan Passer not only water down a terrific, Pulitzer Prize-winning story, but squander a cast that includes revered veterans Mary Steenburgen and Bonnie Bedelia as well as emerging talents Josh Brolin and Gretchen Mol.

One of the most elemental mistakes is to shift the time period from the early ‘50s to 1966. Thus, the priggishness of the era that gave birth to the play is swept aside, and in its place is a society that is already well on its way to liberation by the time Hal--a shockingly handsome but down-on-his-luck former collegiate football star (Brolin)--hits town like a cyclone, shattering people’s self-delusions.

Also quickly dispensed with is any sense of the small town’s imprisoning insularity; soon after the first commercial break, we see Hal and Alan (Ben Caswell), the rich former friend he’s come looking for, zipping along a country road in Alan’s red Mustang convertible, free as can be.

Still more dunderheaded: the attempt to cast a more sympathetic light on the spinster schoolteacher (the role so indelibly played by Rosalind Russell in the 1955 film) who affects piety even as she brazenly lusts after Hal. Here, instead of being the story’s key symbol of hypocrisy, she is a sweet, sunny lady who, under the temporary influence of alcohol, suddenly becomes Blanche DuBois, the tortured heroine of a certain Tennessee Williams play from about the same time. The usually dependable Steenburgen is utterly unable to make it work.

The sole compensations are fleeting images of Brolin’s Hal looking at the harvest queen--who happens to be Alan’s girlfriend (Mol)--like a world he’s just discovered, while Mol flushes with love-struck radiance. Nice, but not nearly enough.

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* “Picnic” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).