AT ITS START, "Decoration Day" looks like a pretty sparse spread, able to raise little more than a cloud of dust as it shuffles along, hat in hand, with the same self-deprecating sort of approach often used by its star, James Garner, as he takes on a role.
Eventually, though, this Hallmark Hall of Fame production for NBC, which will be on Channel 2 (WMAR) Sunday night at 9 o'clock, adds layer upon layer of topsoil, becoming a fertile field for a moving drama about redemption from the sin of retreating from life.
Garner gets to play the role he knows best and does so well, that of the reluctant hero. He is Judge Albert Sidney Finch, a widower prematurely retired from the federal bench at age 58 so that he can spend the rest of his days doing little more than matching wits with the bass in his family pond and with Rowena, the longtime housekeeper who presides over the family homestead.
But one day in the mid-1970s, a far-from-favorite pseudo-nephew named Billy Wendell arrives with the news that Finch's boyhood friend, Gee Pennington, is in some sort of mix-up with the government over a Medal of Honor he was due to receive for heroism in World War II but didn't want.
With one of Garner's patented I-didn't-ask-for-this looks, Finch cranks up his Jeep and drives into town to try to straighten the mess up. And while there he decides to poke into the rumors of Billy's involvement with a courthouse secretary named Terry Novis, an affair that has left Billy's wife, Loreen, dazed and confused back at the Wendell farm with their two kids.
Like a tobacco plant, "Decoration Day" unveils the many leaves of its tale slowly, until it finally stands as a magnificent specimen rising from the red clay of Georgia where this movie was made.
The details of the plot are not all that important. Suffice it to say that it takes Judge Finch back to his boyhood when he and Billy's father were taken under the wing of Gee, a black teen-ager five years their senior, and taught the ways of the woods, the subtle differences between a boy and a man.
Ironically, one of those differences in the South in those days -- indeed until very recently -- was that a white boy could be friends with a black boy on an equal basis, but a white man could not have such a relationship with a black man.
World War II came along, Billy's Dad came back in a box, Gee came back with a bum knee and things were never quite the same again.
