"Heading Home,'' a curiously inert but strikingly passionate made-for-British-TV movie, makes its debut on American television on the A&E channel.

The two-hour telefilm concerns a curiously impassive and strangely beautiful young woman named Janetta (Joely Richardson) who comes to London from the provinces after World War II.

There, she meets a librarian and takes a job in a library, meets a poet named Leonard Meopham (Stephen Dillane) and his girlfriend Beryl (Stella Gonet) and moves in with the former after moving out the latter, then meets a small-time hood named Ian Tyson (Gary Oldman) and becomes his moll.

The story fairly flashes with love and violence. Richardson's Janetta has something burning beneath her cold exterior that not only drives Leonard and Ian wild (in their very different ways) but which is instantly recognizable to the very perceptive Beryl.

As Janetta proceeds with her affairs, she begins to learn that life has quite another side than merely isolated incidents of pleasure and pain, and indelible consequences begin to stain first her present and then her future.

It is all a bit precious, but David Hare's script and direction is extraordinarily poetic and, in its highly stylized way, very realistic.

Dillane is absolutely brilliant in evoking a man whose life and charm and energy totally come out of the magnificence of his brain while Tyson and Oldman are more ordinarily good, making their sensuous characters burn and glow as they ought.

It is Richardson, however, who is the splitting point on this show. For those who find her portrayal accurate, and I suspect that will include women more than men, "Heading Home'' will seem an almost painful experience of great beauty and truth.

Those, however, who never can locate (or believe in) Janetta's spiritual center despite Richardson's undoubted tour de force of acting virtuosity, may just drift off as the plot untangles and her future life becomes revealed.

 

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UK

This film was based on David Hare's play.  You can find it at the Amazon USA or UK online store.

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