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Masterpiece Theatre's rendition of Knoxville's novel

by Jack Neely

ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre's long-anticipated rendition of James Agee's Knoxville-based masterpiece, A Death in the Family, will air Monday night at 9. Most viewers across the country will watch it as the poignant story of a young father's untimely death. Most will find it moving, or, at least, charming.

But you can't blame us if we watch it warily, as we might look at an expensive new portrait of ourselves. This is the first time Knoxville's been portrayed on national TV since those X-Files and Simpsons episodes in the '90s. Meanwhile, in a couple of major motion pictures, the real Knoxville was standing in for 1950s Indianapolis and suburban Chicago.

It's not easy to explain the fact that Knoxville's own best-known story should have been shot in metropolitan Nashville. I don't know whether to blame the aggressiveness of the Nashville Film Commission, the meekness of our own promoters, or the cluelessness of the site scouts. They should have shot it here. And considering the novel's complexity, this should have been a three-parter. But considering they didn't, and it's not, they did passably well.

James Agee's autobiographical novel, published posthumously in 1957, is based heavily on events surrounding Agee's father's sudden death in a car wreck. It wouldn't seem to lend itself to dramatic treatment. There's no sex or physical combat. Much of the novel's action, including the death itself, takes place outside of the narrative. And that narrative depends heavily on a child's unvoiced thoughts: many of the text's most memorable passages, like the child's attempt to picture the inside of his dad's buried coffin, are unportrayable.

This novel, in short, doesn't make for an obvious screenplay. But few novels have seen such a wide variety of theatrical attempts.

Tad Mosel's excellent dramatic interpretation, All the Way Home, was a 1960 Broadway hit that lives on in community-theater productions; like the novel, it won the Pulitzer. Then it became a feature-length film starring Robert Preston. Then, in the '80s, an unusual primetime live-network-TV production starring William Hurt and Sally Field.

Now, here's the Masterpiece Theatre "American Collection" version; it returns to Agee's text, ostensibly, since Mosel's play is unmentioned in the credits. But some aspects of this production bear a stronger resemblance to the play than the novel.

It's well known that Agee wrote the vignette, "Knoxville: Summer 1915," without intending it to be part of A Death In the Family, which is actually set in May, 1916. Editors tacked it on as a prologue to the book only after Agee's death.

However, this movie's set in "Summer, 1915"—which is of little consequence except that it makes this 7-year-old schoolkid a little older than Agee, who was only 5 that summer, and also raises the question of why the kid goes to school in the summertime. The movie infuses the novel with the vignette. There's no narration, but a few lines from "Knoxville: Summer 1915" bubble up in the conversation of the characters.

The fact that the film was "shot entirely in Tennessee" was important enough to cite in the credits. Though set designers took some pains to make their settings look Knoxvillian—they reportedly chalked the asphalt streets to make them resemble Knoxville's distinctive concrete avenues—nitpickers will have a field day with this production. (Somebody apparently told director Gil Cates that they were shooting "near Knoxville." In a press-release interview, Cates claimed that "the story actually took place there, 30 miles away." Was that fib circulated by the Nashville Film Commission?)

Scenes involving Knoxville's concrete viaducts, railyards, and overgrown lots are replaced with lovely parks. The "market bar" isn't a low-down speakeasy, as it would have to have been in 1916 Knoxville, but a proud out-front place labeled "Market Square Bar." The unrolled r's of a few of these Southern accents sound west-of-the-plateau. And the "locusts" Jay describes sound like plain crickets and katydids. Those who enjoy What's-Wrong-With-This-Picture games will have a good deal of fun Monday night. But it's hard to deny that most of its inaccuracies are minor, and several of them are flattering. In the movie, one Fort Sanders avenue has a graceful, treelined median.

More serious complaints concern the characterizations. The casting director did some homework, because several of the actors resemble members of the Agee family. Predictably, though, every one of them's a much simpler person than each is in the book.

Rufus's mother, Mary, is a stern, devout Catholic, sometimes obsessively so, and a bit of a snob. However, as Mary, Annabeth Gish seems warmly sympathetic in every scene, even when she's telling off Ralph. (The Brat-Pack-generation sweetie, most recently appearing on the X-Files, is apparently no relation to Lillian Gish, who played Mary's mother in the original production of All the Way Home.) Likewise, John Slattery plays the flawed Jay as a noble, Lincolnesque ideal. In the book, the couple's relationship is jagged with resentment over their religious and class differences, but Gish and Slattery smooth out the sharp edges, rendering their marriage as a playful yuppie ideal.

In the book, Rufus has a sister, as Agee did: Catherine is a poignant character in the book, a four-year-old child who understands her father's death even less than her older brother does. She also gives Rufus somebody to talk to. In this movie, Catherine doesn't exist. They saved a child-actor's fee and compensated by making Rufus's mother pregnant. Is it coincidence that Mosel, the uncredited playwright, rewrote Agee's plot in exactly the same way in 1960?

James Cromwell, recognizable as Farmer Hoggett in the Babe movies, plays Mary's father (Agee's grandfather was prominent industrialist Joel Tyler) as a strong pragmatist. You wonder whether the cast's best-known actor negotiated the minor role into a bigger one, maybe crowding out the little girl.

Mary's artist-brother Andrew, based on locally well-known artist Hugh Tyler, is played with a lightly artsy/effeminate wash by David Alford; they work in some details from "Knoxville: Summer 1915" via his painting the lawn-watering neighbors in the front yard. His language, and his condemnation of the priest, is much more polite on TV. Christopher Strand is a convincing as the sycophantic lush, Uncle Ralph.

The kid, played by Austin Wolff, was apparently picked for his pie-faced cuteness and for a vague resemblance to the juvenile Agee. He has two expressions: happy and blank. He performs the role better than a stuffed doll would, but some scenes should have been more affecting than they were.

Though the film's pacing is slow, it leaves out much, including the eerie ferryboatman and all the flashbacks, including the family trip to LaFollette. The 90-minute film only hints at the book's dramatic tension. Still, you'll admit that watching this movie is a quiet, lovely way to spend an hour and a half. It's a pretty movie, with lots of lush green trees and bushes and the accurately incessant sound of insects. It's a good companion piece, a tableau, something like a competent Christmas-pageant version of the novel.

Just don't see the movie and think you know the book, which is a good deal more interesting.