Less a Movie than a Cause

By Richard Zoglin

Sakharov, HBO, June 20, 8p.m. E.D.T.

On those rare occasions when frontpage headlines coincide with Hollywood shooting schedules, a movie can suddenly be transformed into a political event. It happened in 1979, when The China Syndrome was released the same month as the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. It occurred again last year, when ABC's The Day After was broadcast just as public concern over the nuclear arms race was reaching a peak. The latest case of such serendipitous timing is Sakharov, a two-hour HBO docudrama on the dissident Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose plight is attracting worldwide attention.

The made-for-pay-TV film has been in the works for two years. Co-produced with HBO by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger (the pair responsible for Holocaust and The Missiles of October, among other TV docudramas) and written by David Rintels (whose research included extensive interviews with Sakharov's stepchildren, now living in the U.S.), the film was shot last fall in Austria and London, completed in April and scheduled for broadcast in September. Then real-life events intervened. On May 2, Sakharov is believed to have begun a hunger strike to protest the Soviet authorities' refusal to let his wife leave the country for treatment of heart disease and glaucoma. With news about the scientist's health or whereabouts curtailed and world concern for his safety growing, HBO executives acceded to a plea from the Sakharov children that an immediate broadcast might help their parents' cause. Result: the film will be given an advance showing next week.

In the hard-nosed world of national television scheduling, such changes are not made lightly. The HBO executives had to overcome doubts, both about letting the film be used for political purposes and about damaging its commercial prospects. With HBO's June schedule long since fixed, the last-minute shift meant the network could not promote the movie as extensively as it would like. Moreover, next week's telecast, which probably will draw a large audience, could hurt the ratings when the film is shown again in September. "At first I resisted the change," says HBO President Michael Fuchs. "I said, 'It's a movie, not a cause.' But now it has become a cause."

After viewing the TV drama, supporters of the cause may find themselves wishing that Sakharov were a better movie. Despite some effective moments, it is routine and rather leaden, afflicted with that odd strain of arthritis that frequently sets in when TV tackles weighty subjects.

The story opens with Sakharov, a widely honored physicist who pioneered development of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb, beginning to question the arms race he helped foster and to resist the Soviet regime's efforts to stifle internal dissent. He quickly graduates from petition signing to more visible protests. He and his second wife, Pediatrician Yelena Bonner, become leaders of a group of dissident intellectuals. Finally, in response to increasing harassment by Soviet officials, he reluctantly sends his stepchildren and their families out of the country for safety.

As Sakharov, Jason Robards provides a commanding presence but few signs of emotional life. His mournful, hound-dog face, lower lip jutting forward in stoic determination, looks ready to apply for enshrinement on Mount Rushmore. He sheds little light on the motives behind Sakharov's late-blooming activism, though the fault may lie more in Rintels' overly reverent script than in Robards' characterization. Glenda Jackson, making a rare U.S. TV performance, brings a few moments of passion to her role as Yelena. In one scene, she chillingly describes the courtroom cheers that greeted a death sentence handed out to some Jewish friends charged with treason. But Jackson too seems weighed down by the burden of secular sainthood. In a typical exchange, Sakharov laments the expulsion of his stepdaughter from the university. "They're punishing our children for what we do," he says. Responds Yelena: "What we do is right."

The docudrama's portrayal of Soviet life is unconvincing, especially after the flavorful re-creations in such recent films as Gorky Park and Moscow on the Hudson. Its aspirations to realism are frequently betrayed by melodramatics. KGB agents seem to lurk behind every door, like B-movie heavies. But when a witness at a political trial surreptitiously slips a sheaf of documents to Sakharov just before taking the stand, the action is miraculously unseen by any of the guards in the crowded courtroom.

All of this may matter little in a film whose interest transcends its artistic shortcomings. Sakharov brings the story of a courageous man to an audience that may know little of him beyond a few sentences from Dan Rather on the evening news. (An update to be inserted at the end of the telecast will fill viewers in on the latest developments.) The film has already been seen on Dutch TV, and will be shown in several other European countries. Sakharov probably should be compared, not to such other TV biographical epics as George Washington or Kennedy, but to those social-problem dramas that aim to educate viewers and perhaps rouse them to action. If Sakharov helps mobilize public pressure on the Soviet regime to end its persecution of the Sakharovs, then this TV movie can justifiably call itself a grand success.

--By Richard Zoglin