A mosaic of compassion and family

“Plainsong,” a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie that CBS will broadcast Sunday night, could have gone the way of shows that ridicule rural people as bumbling bumpkins. Instead, “Plainsong” shows them as compassionate and self-reliant.

“You don’t get to do too many things that have this many characters from small communities,” says Aidan Quinn (“Legends of the Fall”), who stars as Tom, a high school teacher. “It’s like the place I live in upstate [New York]. Rural people are completely and utterly underrepresented in the media, in films and in television. I have spent a fair amount of time in small communities, and lived in them, and I thought this was really nice, the mosaic of all these characters.”

It is indeed a mosaic, as characters leading separate lives in rural Colorado forge strong bonds. Just because the camera lingers on beautiful open skies and fields does not mean this is a Norman Rockwell interpretation of America.

Rather, Tom’s wife, Ella (Megan Follows), falls into a deep depression and leaves him with their two young sons (Cody Arens, Mick Hazen). Tom also has problems in school, where the principal pressures him to pass the star basketball player.

Another student, Victoria (America Ferrera), is pregnant at 17, and the father, at least at first, is out of her life. Soon, her mother is as well when she kicks Vicky out of their trailer. With nowhere to go, she knocks on the door of a sympathetic teacher, Maggie (Rachel Griffiths, “Six Feet Under”). Maggie, who cares for her sick father, can’t keep Vicky indefinitely.

So she comes up with the notion to have Vicky live on a farm with two old bachelor brothers, Raymond and Harold McPheron (Geoffrey Lewis, William Andrews).

“In the small towns, you have to rely more on your own resources,” Griffiths explains. “There is no kind of passing the buck.”

Although no doormat, Maggie has enough wisdom to encourage her friendship with Tom, take care of her dad and be supportive of Vicky. “She is the kind of woman you really want as your best friend,” Griffiths says.

Ultimately, the old bachelor farmers become the teenage mother’s surrogate family. The quiet dad raises his boys knowing there’s a possibility that a divorced teacher may join their lives. Regardless of what the future brings to these characters, they are making it with the help of one another.

“Hallmark would probably be aghast at me for saying this,” Griffiths says. “For me, the ideal family unit may well be two adults in a very longtime relationship, in terms of providing a safe and secure environment for the kids. But unfortunately, that’s not the reality for a lot of kids.

“And we have to start supporting alternative families. The foster system is so burdened. At the same time, you have incredibly loving and stable gay couples who would love to foster children, and the system judges that would not be moral, or for the good of the child. And, in the meantime, you have the child winding up in the streets. These things really have to change.”

*

Jaqueline Cutler writes for Tribune Media Services.