The inspirational super-team of Oprah Winfrey and Mitch Albom dare you not to have your heart warmed with their emotional bully of a TV movie, For One More Day (ABC, December 9, 9 p.m.). The latest bit of treacle adapted from one of Albom’s megapopular books (Tuesdays With Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven have previously been made into ABC movies), Day is exactly what you expect it to be, and not always in an unappealing way. Michael Imperioli is a downer, though, as main character Charles “Chick” Benetto, a depressed ex-baseball player who, at the beginning of the movie, is preparing to kill himself. Drunk and weaving on the road back to his hometown, Chick crashes into a tree and has the sort of life-changing fever dream that people facing death in movies and on TV seem to always end up with.
Although he’s obviously still injured and in his car (“subtle” sounds of sirens and rescue workers pop up from time to time), Chick appears to wander into town, where he spots his saintly mother (Ellen Burstyn), who died nine years before. Chick, who missed the last day of Mom’s life, is granted a make-up day so she can tell him all about how he screwed up his life and how he needs to nix the whole suicide plan and make up with his estranged wife and daughter.
The “stop whining and embrace life” message is Albom’s stock in trade, and largely Winfrey’s as well (she serves as the movie’s executive producer). But Day also has a weird undercurrent of anti-individuality and anti-fatherhood that at times undermines its fuzzy, largely inoffensive (if boring) tone. Chick’s mother is made out to be long-suffering and righteous, the person who always knew what was right for her son even if he never listened to her. And Chick’s domineering father is obviously the movie’s villain: He not only sleeps around, but he also has an entire other family; he constantly berates his wife and children; and he pushes Chick to become an athlete at the cost of his academic achievement.
Clearly, Dad is not such a great guy. But Mom doesn’t actually come off any better. Although Chick dreams of nothing more than being a professional athlete, and actually has the talent to back it up (he ends up playing, however briefly, in the World Series), Mom insists that he abandon his athletic dreams to pursue schooling in which he clearly has no interest. She never, even in her spectral life-affirming form, acknowledges that playing baseball was rewarding or good for him. She is, in her own way, just as terrible a parent as Chick’s dad, only far more passive-aggressive.
It’s hard to tell if these stifling values are deliberate or merely a byproduct of the movie’s tired, old-fashioned storytelling (and who’s named Chick these days, anyway?). Imperioli may be a total wet blanket, but both Burstyn and Samantha Mathis (who plays Mom in flashbacks) are excellent and do great things to help the sentimentality go down easier. No such high marks can be given to Imperioli’s son Vadim, who’s obnoxious and stiff as the young Chick.
Albom and Winfrey fans will likely only care if the movie makes them cry and then call their mothers, which it undoubtedly will. It does that with as much guilt as love, though, and for that its emotional catharsis carries a very bitter aftertaste.
For One More Day
**