Based on Lanford Wilson's play of the same name, REDWOOD CURTAIN is the tepid made-for-TV story of a young Amer-Asian woman's search for her identity.
Geri Riordan (Lea Salonga), is an 18-year-old musical prodigy. Born to an American father and a Vietnamese mother during the Vietnam war, Geri was adopted by Laird Riordan (John Lithgow), a Vietnam veteran and his wife Julia (Catherine Hicks), a distant workaholic. The film opens with Geri
performing a piano concert, watched by her Dad. Afterwards, he praises her technique but tells her she must "risk everything" to achieve magnificence. After Laird dies from alcoholism, Geri, left alone with her cold foster mother, becomes obsessed with finding out as much as she can about her real
parents.
She goes to visit her Aunt Geneva (Debra Monk), in California's Redwood Forest. Before Geri leaves, Julia gives her a box that Laird left, which contains a few clues about Geri's birth parents, including her father's possible name, "Ray Farrow." Geri is intrigued by one of the "men from the
forest" who follows her around town. These men, a local tells her, are Vietnam vets who "barely escaped the bamboo curtain, now they just want to get lost behind the Redwood curtain." Geri, convinced that one man can lead her to her real father, invades the forest. She confronts Lyman Fellers
(Jeff Daniels), her stalker. He warns her to leave him alone. With help from Geneva, Geri figures out that his name, when pronounced with a Vietnamese accent would sound similar to "Ray Farrow." She deduces that he must be her real father. She is wrong. Lyman reveals that Geri's mother wanted her
to have a life in America with her father. Her real father couldn't bring her home with him because he already had a wife in the States. But he wanted to keep Geri. When asked why he didn't, Lyman states: "He did. He just fixed it with the adoption people." Once Geri finds out that Laird was her
real father after all she is able to release her grief through her music.
Wilson's play is complex, but the Hallmark Hall of Fame adaption is simplistic. Geneva's running monologues about her late brother's "demons" offer no details let alone insights. What did happen in Vietnam? Not much is revealed in this film. And while Geri is the center of the story, she remains a
cipher. Daniels reprises his stage role and gives a noble but limited performance. This movie about a search for one's past stays in the present to the point of stagnation. As Geri realized, after her father drank himself to death while the family looked on: "Maybe we were all too polite." REDWOOD
CURTAIN suffers from the same problem. (Profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment