Wildflower
Director Diane Keaton brings a tender touch toWildflower, a Lifetime cable-TV movie showcasing early-career excellence from Reese Witherspoon and Patricia Arquette. Witherspoon's big-screen debut inThe Man in the Moonhad premiered shortly before this movie's original broadcast in 1991, and a year earlier, Arquette had starred in a Keaton-directed CBS Schoolbreak Special,The Boy with the Crazy Brother. These rising talents are well served by Sara Flanigan's teleplay, closely adapted from her popular juvenile novelAlice. Set in the mid-1930s, the story follows two compassionate teens (Witherspoon, William McNamara) who discover and essentially adopt a partially deaf epileptic (Arquette) who'd been locked away by her psychotically abusive father. Beau Bridges and Susan Blakely provide different parental perspectives, and while Keaton doesn't always avoid Flanigan's tear-jerking sentiment, she handles it with delicate grace. Aiding her are a gifted cast and the fine cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, who would soon begin an enduring collaboration with Steven Spielberg.--Jeff Shannon