Movie could become evergreen

If you can squeeze one more holiday TV special into your busy schedule, make it "The Christmas Tree," which airs on ABC on Dec. 22.

The underlying premise for this fictional film originated in real life: A recent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was donated by an order of nuns who graciously gave up a familiar part of their convent's landscape for the enjoyment of others.

With that basis, "The Christmas Tree" focuses on a single, fictional nun, Sister Anthony, making her the caretaker of the tree from her arrival at the convent as an orphan. She is played by Julie Harris, whose legendary talent as an actress is in full display here.

Introduced into the nun's life is Richard Reilly, the man Rockefeller Center has charged with finding a tree enormous and striking enough to follow in the footsteps -- er, root stems -- of its predecessors. He is played by Andrew McCarthy.

Life story

Through flashbacks, Sister Anthony tells Richard about her life as an orphan, as a pupil of the sisters, as a young woman in love and as an adult who decided to become a nun. As he listens to her tales, he begins to question his own choices in life: business over love, for example.

That introduces his assistant at work and love interest, played by Trini Alvarado. Unable to declare his intentions toward her, Richard feels something is missing in his life. The film brings them together but leaves a loose end; we could have used a proposal scene.

Another flaw in "The Christmas Tree" is its treatment of some of the sisters, who come off as ditzy and dithering rather than as the educated, committed women most sisters are. There is also the hoary gag of the hard-of-hearing nun who misinterprets what everyone says.

Touching

But those quibbles aside, this two-hour film, directed by actress Sally Field (who, of course, played a sister in "The Flying Nun"), is a touching drama about a woman's growth alongside a tree, which represents not only her stability but also her "stuck-ness."

As long as the tree is implanted firmly in the soil, so is she. As Richard points out, her lectures about being a free spirit don't match her own life; it has become stultified.

It's not easy to make an inanimate object a major character in a story, but Harris, McCarthy and Field pull it off. When the tree is finally cut down, Harris's shudder at the sound of the power saw makes you want to stop the workman; that's how attached you have become to the Norwegian spruce. It could become, after Charlie Brown's skimpy branch, the second most famous Christmas tree on television.

December is stuffed with holiday specials of all sorts, and I've always recommended picking only a few to keep your Advent and Christmas from becoming a TV marathon. But if you've got room on your schedule for one more, try "The Christmas Tree." It's a spruce that might make you a weeping willow.

(12-19-96) [[In-content Ad]]