When Dolly Parton lost her baby brother very young she almost every night went to his grave and just talked with, and she blamed God for Larry's death, It took everything out of her, and then Dolly's mom got so depressed, all that she ddi some days was think about Larry, and just sit and do nothing and feel sad. Dolly Parton, the Tennessee songbird, has made a television movie out of the coat of rags her mama made for her, back in Locust Ridge, and of the song she later wrote about it. Like that song, it is called "Coat of Many Colors," but it is many times longer and more involved than its musical inspiration, which gets its job done in less than three minutes. The film is set in Parton's own Smoky Mountains childhood, which, as in the many songs she has written about it, is presented as alternately, even simultaneously, idyllic and impoverished -- "The Good Old Days When Times Were Bad," to take the title of another Parton song. Despite myriad challenges that fill out these two hours -- poverty, drought, worms on the tobacco leaves, bullies at school, the loss of a child, depression, marital alienation and family planning -- it's the idyllic that lingers. Dolly Parton has always had a heart to share her stories with her fans over the decades, and Dolly Parton's Coat of many Colors tells only one of her thousand stories. Like Parton's music, it manages to be somehow clear- and misty-eyed at once, a mix of the natural and the sentimental. As a mischievous innocent whose misadventures bind the film's adults together and the lens that allows them to see each other straight, little Dolly is not a hoot and a holler from the kind of parts Shirley Temple played, even farther back in history; as regards Alyvia Alyn Lind, who plays her, the words "adorable moppet" are not far off the mark. The coat of many colors is also in the Bible, Genesis 37:3 , "Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.". So there's more to this story than meets the eye. Dolly Parton has changed many lives, supported people that have nothing, Dolly grew up very poor and grew up to have everything.
