True Women is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Janice Woods Windle, her first. The novel was based on a cookbook of family recipes Windle collected to give to her son at his wedding. You don't see much cooking going on in True Women, which is a real shame, because it would have to be better than what passes for drama here.
The story purports to be about the strong nature of three 19th-century Southern women: Windle's great-great grandmother, Euphemia Texas Ashby (Annabeth Gish); Euphemia's older sister, Sarah (Dana Delany); and Euphemia's childhood friend, Georgia Lawshe Woods (Angelina Jolie).
We do see Delany and Gish wielding rifles and pistols with relish at Mexicans, Indians and Yankees. Jolie's weapons of choice are gnashed teeth and overly pouted lips. True Women is perpetually on a war footing. It's raison d'etre seems to be the stringing together of deathbed and burial scenes. The death rate is extraordinary, and it is extraordinarily equal-opportunity.
Friends and foes bite the dust in equal measure. Comanches and colonists, Texans and Mexicans, the elderly and the stillborn, the buck-shot and the diseased, Yankees and Rebels, Reconstructionists and the unreconstructed.
The mini-series wants to have the epic sweep of Lonesome Dove and Sarah, Plain and Tall, but True Women misses on so many counts. Foremost is the writing, which makes the worst of daytime soaps seem Shakespearean in comparison. The characters speak in disjointed epigrams, as if the screenwriters had delved into the Bible, found passages and said, ``Hey, here's a nifty one, but it needs a bit of tweaking.'' When tragedy strikes, as it does in every fourth scene, there is always a heaving sigh and a ``It's God's will'' to punctuate it.
The acting is incredibly over-the-top. Delany, for whom so much was hoped after her star turn in the series China Beach, delivers another in a long line of mediocre performances here. Her character is portrayed as the matriarch of Texas itself, leading a caravan of women and children across Southern Texas as a decoy move for General Sam Houston as he and his rangers defeat Santa Ana in the Mexican War. From then on, Delany cannot stop yelling at everyone or looking morose as yet another man in her life dies.
Gish is the best of the three main characters, but only because she doesn't have as many tragic scenes. She's a strident anti-slavery advocate who actually has a slave, an interesting conflict in deft hands, but only a reason to have the various women shout some more in True Women. Jolie, Jon Voight's daughter, is horrid, a fourth-rate Scarlett O'Hara whose best move is the traditional holding up of petticoats and running across the room after an angry, tearful confrontation.
Men are mere adjuncts to the story. A few named characters are thrown in: Powers Boothe as Delany's husband; Michael York as Jolie's father; Charles Dutton as a curiously retired slave. Each seems pretty tired in his role, their acting perhaps better for being so somnolent.
This is apparently an attempt by CBS to do a ``women's'' drama. That in itself would be a reason to protest its existence. The networks have started to so micromanage their programming that soon there won't be any programs that two people are allowed to watch together. ``Sorry, Uncle Marvin, this show is a TV-MAW, only Middle-Aged Women can watch. I think there's a `Murder, She Wrote' repeat on at 11 for you.''
On top of everything, True Women jumps around in time at a whiplash pace. No sooner do you get used to people fighting Mexicans than they are fighting Comanches or Creeks or Yankees or cholera. You certainly can't figure out what year it is by anyone's makeup. Delany, for instance, looks the same at 25 and 55, only being given the least amount of gray hair in the final scene, when she is apparently about 80, but looking 50. A Dennis-Rodmanesque painted Indian warrior named Tarantula is a virile young strongman around the Civil War and then is portrayed as a geriatric in a scene from the 1870s.
Perhaps Tarantula was forced to sit through the dailies on True Women, an embarrassment of a mini-series that could prematurely age anyone so bored with real life as to watch it.
What Morty's up to. The man David Letterman used to introduce as Robert Bob Morty Morton, back when they were still speaking, is anxiously awaiting next week's fall lineup announcements by ABC and Fox. Unceremoniously fired as exec producer of Letterman's Late Show in March 1996, Morton formed Panamort Television and produced a number of pilots. ABC is considering sitcoms Missing Links, about golf-course buddies, and Over the Top, about a faded actor and his innkeeper ex-wife. Fox is looking at Deadline Now, a totally fabricated newscast. Morton, who dates ABC entertainment president Jamie Tarses, says their relationship won't influence ABC's decision.
