"Earthly Possessions" opens on Susan Sarandon, and it closes on Sarandon. In between, not a minute goes by when Sarandon isn't on screen. And what a delight it is to see this Academy Award-winning actress going full-throttle as an Anne Tyler heroine.
Maybe that's all you need to know in terms of viewing choices tonight: HBO has Susan Sarandon in a film based on an Anne Tyler novel of the same name. Brand identity times three. If you're still not sold, let me just say that I haven't enjoyed another made-for-television movie this much all season.
The story begins on a rainy day in a small-town bank where Charlotte Emory (Sarandon), the wife of a minister, is standing in line, waiting to make a withdrawal of money she's been saving to finance an escape from her marriage and a sheltered life. Like any proper Tyler heroine, she is nervously chattering away in stream-of-consciousness to the perfect stranger standing in front of her.
Suddenly, everyone starts falling to the floor. Someone screams, "He's got a gun." And, again, like a proper Tyler heroine, Charlotte is just a few beats behind the rest of the world in figuring out that she's standing in the middle of a bank robbery.
Charlotte gets the message when the hooded robber grabs her from behind, puts a gun to her head and tells her to stay calm. Before she knows it, she's out the door, down the street and forced onto a bus headed for high adventure and who knows where.
What a pair, the eccentric, high-strung, talkative Charlotte and her kidnapper, Jake (Steven Dorff), a young, sullen, tightly wrapped, none-too-bright, almost-but-not-quite-got-it-right bank robber.
"Well, if you're not even going to try, I don't know how to talk to somebody who's so secretive," Charlotte says accusingly as they settle into the bus ride.
"Then just shut up," Jake says, poking his gun into her ribs.
Jake's main response to each of the many bad choices and mistakes he makes during their flight is, "Just shut up and let me think."
Of course, as scattered and kooky as she might seem, Charlotte is the one with the brains. She's also centered morally and emotionally in her own peculiar and winning way. Remember, we are traveling in the Tyler universe.
As for Jake, the more he thinks, the more confused their flight from the pursuing police gets. Adding craziness to confusion, the two start to bond and care for one another despite their age and other major differences.
Director James Lapine says he was thinking "Alice in Wonderland" in his approach to the film.
"These two characters, particularly Charlotte, end up going down this kind of rabbit hole, and I tried to create that kind of story line," Lapine says. "Charlotte and Jake have certain things in common, because they are both running away from their lives and responsibilities."
But Lapine is also playing with our shared memory of "Thelma and Louise," which featured Sarandon in one of her most memorable film roles. The tone and sociology of "Earthly Possessions" and "Thelma and Louise" are radically different. But many of the same elements are at play in both: the fugitives watching TV news accounts of their journey and getting upset with the way they are depicted, the husband back home giving the "he said" version of his wife's mindset, the two travelers finding their emotional way the farther and farther they veer off the main roads.
Sarandon is best known for her work in such films as "Dead Man Walking," for which she won the Best Actress Oscar in 1995. But she is also a brilliant comic actress whose face seems never to run out of new and wonderfully interesting reactions to the strange people and places she encounters on Charlotte's odyssey.
The ultimate measure of the greatness of her work in this film is how good she makes Dorff's performance seem through her kaleidoscope of reactions to it. Sarandon is just heavenly in "Earthly Possessions."
'Possessions'
When: Tonight, 8 to 10
Where: HBO
Pub Date: 3/20/99