Review of Fallen Angel

***SPOILERS--No way to detail complaints without them******************* This movie has a promising beginning. We see a motherless nine year old boy who is already beginning to realize that his father is so consumed with his job as caretaker for the big city rich who summer in his Maine hometown that he will never have time for his son. The young boy meets a pampered rich girl whose parents are that age-old cliche--nice guy/tennis and ski bum who married into money and the cold wife who never lets him forget who holds the purse strings. These children and the upper class father are in an accident that will break apart the young girl's family. The children will not meet again until thirty years later and anyone who saw this film's television commercials--or has even see a TV movie-- knows what happens next, but, my god, the writer and director could have tried harder to inject a little verve and originality into the formula! I mainly watched this so I could see one of my favorite actors play something besides a tortured, corrupt soul, but Gary Sinise looked so uncomfortable or stiff much of the time that all this movie showed was that either he should never try to play a romantic lead or that he felt so defeated by the script that he gave up before filming started. Poor Ms. Richardson has to deliver such clunky lines--has the writer ever heard an actual woman talk?--that she should get some sort of combat pay. The best part of the film deals with the children and the teen-aged Terry's alienation from his father--after that. . .SPOILER ALERT: I especially resented the "let's ice skate, fall down and laugh" scene--gee, I've never seen this before--instead an honest attempt to portray a burgeoning relationship. In one of the few surprising moments of the film, we find out the female lead has a daughter who is blind. Maybe the child actress who read for the part was actually blind and they wrote it into the script, but if that wasn't the case, then I see no reason for this plot wrinkle AS IT WAS PRESENTED except to add just one more heart-tugging element to a film that was already dealing--in a superficial and ham-handed way--with death, homelessness, estrangement, and guilt. The whole situation just seemed like one more cheap ploy to pull pathos out of a film that didn't know how to use good acting and sharp writing to earn it.