Let's Hear It for Fiction

By Richard Zoglin

As the year of the TV-news re-enactment comes to a close, a backlash has set in. Last week NBC News announced it would stop using the controversial technique. CBS's Saturday Night with Connie Chung is reportedly considering whether to phase out its re-creations as well. Meanwhile, TV movies like The Final Days are drawing fire from some critics for using fictional techniques to tamper with "reality."

So it may be time to speak up for fiction. Dramatizations of historical events and social issues, though troubling when they mingle with news, do have their place, as playwrights from Shakespeare to Shaw have proved. Even the lowly TV docudrama occasionally shows what the form can do. A moving and eloquent film such as No Place Like Home, about a working-class family that descends into homelessness, not only puts human flesh on an abstract problem but also transforms it into something approaching tragedy.

Lee Grant, the actress-filmmaker who directed this CBS movie, has dealt with homelessness from both sides of the fact-fiction divide. In 1986 she won an ^ Academy Award for her documentary Down and Out in America. A couple interviewed in that film who had been burned out of their Brooklyn apartment and were living with their five children in a welfare hotel apparently provided the models for Mike and Zan Cooper, the parents played by Jeff Daniels and Christine Lahti in No Place Like Home. They too lose their home in a fire, which takes not only all their belongings but also Mike's job as the building superintendent. From there, the family of four is thrust into an odyssey of urban rootlessness. They live at a motel until it gets too expensive; with Mike's brother and sister-in-law before an argument drives them away; at a campground before regulations force them to move on. Finally, they turn to a city shelter, from which they are sent to a seedy welfare hotel. "Mommy, I don't like it here," says little Tina on seeing their sad room, with its peeling plaster, rattraps and dusty bunk bed. "Honey, it won't be for too long," says Mom.

She's right, unfortunately. Mike loses his part-time job and must leave the city to look for work. At the hotel, a security guard sexually attacks Zan while threatening to turn in her son David for making drug runs. Forced to flee the shelter, mother and children show up at Mike's brother's door, but find no one home. In desperation they break into the house but are rousted out by the police. Their next stop: the streets.

No Place Like Home does not escape some TV-movie simplifications. The minor characters, like Mike's oily boss, are often cardboard villains. The Cooper kids (Lantz Landry and Kyndra Joy Casper) seem too well scrubbed for these mean streets, and the film draws back from the worst consequences of the horrific environment: though David makes drug deliveries to earn money, for instance, he somehow never tries drugs.

But the movie brings homelessness home by presenting it not as a cause for charity but as a recognizable human misfortune, almost inevitable given the circumstances. Grant's direction is both sensitive and street-smart (filming was done in Pittsburgh). Daniels, though too fresh-faced as the blue-collar father, brings hot-tempered passion to the role. And Lahti, possibly the best actress in America working in TV (she won an Emmy nomination for her performance in the mini-series Amerika), is truly heartbreaking. She can convey both the despair lurking behind a brave comment to her husband and a pathetic joy at ever smaller victories. "You guys, look!" she gasps on first ^ seeing their decrepit bathroom in the welfare hotel. "Privacy!" In the controversy over fact vs. fiction, real artistry can settle a lot of debates.