Dalva

Farrah Fawcett plays Dalva, the granddaughter of a rancher in Nebraska--white but with an Indian heritage--who was once discouraged by grandpa in her love affair with the handsome Native-American boy she wanted to marry and whose baby she was carrying (seems gramps neglected to mention when the two kids met that they were half-siblings, something which may have discouraged them from making love in the hayloft!). 30 years after the baby was taken away by adoption authorities, Dalva wants to pick up the threads of her past. Judith Paige Mitchell adapted Jim Harrison's well-regarded book for TV, giving Fawcett another tiresome opportunity (after 1994's "The Substitute Wife") to do her little-girl act (lots of over-the-shoulder glances and coy, trembling smiles). Rod Steiger, Carroll Baker, Peter Coyote and Powers Boothe make up the strong supporting cast, yet the movie has been pieced together by director Ken Cameron into some sort of soggy bucolic valentine, dappled with sunlight and morning dew. Fawcett reads Dalva's journal in voiceover as if the lazy-hazy descriptions of love were poetry, but the whole thing is strenuous and draining. Laurel Holloman, as an outrageous flirt with a shovel-wielding father, livens up the scenario--why wasn't the movie about her?