With a slate of provocative offerings like “The Wire,” “Deadwood” and “The Sopranos,” HBO has broken ground in the evolution of the television narrative.
These shows not only produced memorable characters – and, in Tony Soprano’s case, a part of pop culture – they also suggested ways in which the small screen can deliver increasingly complex and challenging fare for demanding viewers.
HBO has set the dramatic bar so high that apparently not even the network itself can now reach it.
“Empire Falls,” the latest HBO Films entry, a two-part miniseries debuting Saturday and Sunday, looks pretty but has no heft. It could have been a Hallmark TV postcard for all its down-home homilies. There’s even a rainbow at the end.
“You can’t make your heart behave,” says Ed Harris in his role as Miles Roby, flipping burgers at the Empire Grill.
“Anything can be fixed,” declares Paul Newman as Miles’ father.
“Resistance is not futile,” teaches the folksy narrator.
They have learned these profound truths from life – or maybe from one of those mini-self-help guides you can buy at the cash register in chain book stores; it’s not clear.
Despite a stellar cast – Newman, Harris, Joanne Woodward, Helen Hunt, Aidan Quinn – and Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as source material, “Empire” falls flat.
Russo’s book concerns the rich and poor families of a declining mill town in Maine, their intertwined past, and their relationship to the Knox River and the town’s abandoned shirt factory. Russo wrote the screenplay too, and the result is a poignant trifle.
For HBO, the production was a diplomatic and strategic move, mostly about maintaining Hollywood friendships and keeping the script away from the competition.
Newman, who starred in the fine movie version of Russo’s “Nobody’s Fool,” fell in love with “Empire Falls” and wanted to expand it beyond a standard two-hour feature.
“Every studio in town was after Richard Russo’s book,” HBO Films president Colin Callender has said. Newman approached HBO and, with director Fred Schepisi (“Roxanne,” “Six Degrees of Separation”), assembled the impressive cast.
And so Newman does the cranky grandpappy shtick as Max Roby, the old salt with perpetual crumbs in his beard, father to Miles (Ed Harris), who is stuck running the struggling diner, the Empire Grill, at the behest of the town matriarch, the widowed Francine Whiting, played by Woodward.
Francine is the richest woman in town, with a cat as mean as she is. The widow manipulates all the locals, but she particularly has her claws out for Miles. Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays her late husband, the wealthy C.B. Whiting, who had the nerve to straighten the river to extend the property where he built his grand house. The river, of course, will have the last word.
Helen Hunt is an odd choice to play Miles’ estranged wife, Janine. (Her fine features don’t jibe with Janine’s uneducated plainness.) Janine is dating the town health-club proprietor, a slickster called the “Silver Fox,” well played by Dennis Farina. Quinn (“An Early Frost”) is likable as Miles’ brother David, and Kate Burton is terrific as the disabled Whiting daughter Cindy, who has always loved Miles.
Harris is the glue that keeps the piece intact; he shows Miles gradually gathering nerve. A subplot involving Miles’ daughter and bullies at school feels grafted onto the tale.
Through it all, Miles experiences flashbacks to his childhood with his mom (Robin Wright Penn) and puts together a puzzle of romantic entanglements and family secrets.
As directed by Schepisi, “Empire Falls” takes on a winking veneer with illustrated arrows, X’s and circles drawn over the old photographs. Juxtaposed with the overly sincere narration, the gimmick doesn’t work.
Pretentiously divided into eight “chapters,” the movie feels less literate than any of the serial dramas HBO has attempted. After much trauma and heartache, the final section gets down to healing.
Like “boats against the current,” the hours push on until, at last, the river exacts its revenge and the rainbow shines.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
