Video: Less a Movie than a Cause

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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