Holiday fare you just won't believe

By Paul Brownfield

Dec. 3, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Around the holidays, Hollywood reduces its sales pitch to a simple word: Believe. “The Polar Express?” Believe. Nicolas Cage in an action movie where that’s really his hair? Believe.

Two TV movies airing Sunday night, ABC’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” and CBS’ “A Very Married Christmas,” wish to make us, you guessed it, believe -- one in the afterlife as a place where unresolved feelings go to heal, the other in the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage and -- by weird extension, because I didn’t know he dabbled in couples therapy -- Santa Claus.

“The Five People You Meet in Heaven” is actually called “Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” which makes you wonder whether there’s a franchise here, as in “Martha Stewart’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven” or “Incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven.”

The ABC three-hour extravaganza, airing Sunday night at 8, is based on Albom’s bestselling follow-up to his bestselling “Tuesdays with Morrie,” which I didn’t read but understand was moving, in an Oprah way, and quick (it was also a TV movie, starring the late Jack Lemmon).

I read “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” because ABC helpfully sent it with the tape of the movie. This book, too, was moving, in an Oprah way, and quick -- a fable about an embittered old amusement park maintenance man named Eddie (Eddie Maintenance, the kids call him, because it says Maintenance on his work shirt) who dies trying to save a girl from being crushed by a ride. He goes to heaven and meets five people integral to his life, who teach him the value of his time on Earth, which at the time he was living he was too closed off emotionally and by circumstance to understand.

In the course of an afternoon, I gobbled up the book like popcorn. Several times I believed. The book is commercial hokum -- if spare, well-crafted hokum -- with a nostalgic setting (its seaside amusement park is named Ruby Pier) and dreamy, New Agey imaginings of the afterlife. Even when it dispenses its saccharine homilies (“Strangers are just families you have yet to come to know”), it does so without discursiveness.

The movie, unfortunately, turns a fast read into a laborious 131 minutes of believing, and that’s assuming you don’t have a moment of belief during the commercials. This is roughly the equivalent of three “Desperate Housewives,” the Sunday night hit that ABC is preempting for this movie. “Five People” is not only meandering, it’s ponderous, syrupy, and overblown. Albom, who wrote the teleplay, and director Lloyd Kramer treat the world of the book as deep and nuanced, when, like any fable, it is neither. Illustrating this tale, however lavishly, has the effect of smothering it to death.

Almost from the moment you hear Ellen Burstyn’s first bit of narration over dreamy images of a sky (“You might think it strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time”) you know you’re in for something that will take its sweet time to unfold.

What is inevitably lost is the manipulative power of the self-contained little parable Albom fashioned for his readers. There is a hefty cast, lush cinematography and a sentimental, give-me-more-piano-and-strings score, but it all has the effect of placing a large platter of food on a small coffee table. Jon Voight stars as Eddie, all craggy faced and moist-eyed, a man of few words but deep feelings. Albom made it easy on himself by creating a character who was, despite his shortcomings, abundantly virtuous, even when he fails other people.

In heaven, Eddie meets five people (God, apparently, is using his vacation days): the Blue Man (Jeff Daniels), a carnival freak from his youth; the Captain (Michael Imperioli of “The Sopranos”), Eddie’s commanding officer when he was captured and held as a POW in World War II; Ruby (Burstyn), for whom the name of the amusement park, Ruby Pier, was given; and his wife, Marguerite (Dagmara Dominczyk).

These people (the fifth can’t be revealed without spoiling things) take Eddie back through his life, and thus more peacefully into his death. This is the overarching, pop idea of “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” -- it’s all a process, we’re all connected, death is discovery and heaven has the answers.

If ABC’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” is writ too large, CBS’ “A Very Married Christmas,” airing Sunday night at 9, is just poorly writ. Here, Joe Mantegna and Jean Smart play a middle-aged couple with a precocious daughter (Jordy Benattar) from whom they’re hiding their marital woes. The wife is having an affair with an auto mechanic (vroom, vroom) and wants out; he takes a job as a shopping mall Santa and flirts with Donna, Santa’s blond, medium-sized helper (Kari Matchett).

Again, it all gets back to believing. For instance, I had a hard time believing that Mantegna and Smart could breathe life into this holiday TV movie. Mantegna’s leaden, hangdog presence is good for a few laughs when he’s walking around in the Santa suit, but he and Smart, who has played this role enough times now that I’m beginning actually to believe she is my sitcom mother, have zero chemistry.

‘A Very Married Christmas’

Where: CBS

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language)

Joe Mantegna...Frank Griffin

Jean Smart...Ellen Griffin

Kari Matchett...Donna

Charles Durning...Ozzie

Executive producers Larry Sanitsky, Joyce Eliason. Teleplay Joyce Eliason. Director Tom McLoughlin.

‘Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven’

Where: ABC

When: 8-11 p.m. Sunday