Arrow-right Camera
Subscribe now

Tyson’s Powerful Acting Talent Comes Through In ‘Galveston’

Tom Maurstad Dallas Morning News

“The Road to Galveston” opens with Cicely Tyson, dressed in a simple print dress, walking across a farm field to bring lunch to her husband, hard at work behind a plow. And so, with its first image, Tyson’s character recalls a career of characters trailing back through the decades.

“Sounder,” “Roots,” “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow” - a generation of TV and film audiences has grown up watching Cicely Tyson play variations on a role - the noble, enduring woman. Actors become typecast in the same way that cliches become cliches - they ring with an essential truth. As Jordan Roosevelt, a newly widowed woman struggling to make and keep her place in the world, Tyson conjures all those familiar qualities of grace, patience and quiet strength without striking a false note or reclining into caricature.

This would be impressive enough, but it is made all the more so by occurring in a movie and among actors busy doing both. Filmed around Galveston and Houston, “The Road to Galveston” tells the based-on-fact story of a woman who must figure out a way to save her farm when her husband dies.

It is an original movie from USA, America’s most-watched cable network, which seems determined to change its image as a maker of women-as-victim movies.

Cornered by mounting bills and her city-dwelling son’s insistence that she sell the farm, Roosevelt takes in three Alzheimer’s patients - ranging from the open-eyed catatonia of Gayle (Sallie Ellis) to the free-associative wanderings of Wanda (Piper Laurie) to the fearful rage of Julia (Tess Harper).

Of course, what began as a desperate move to earn some income blooms into something much more. In a movie about widowhood and Alzheimer’s, about loss and grief and the healing powers of hope, the emotional strings are big and easily pulled. Handled skillfully, this can add to a moment’s resonance. We get all sorts of poignant glimpses of the woman Wanda used to be from the subtle mix of confusion and stubbornness Laurie washes across her face as she speaks her insistent babble.

But more often, it leads to overwrought sentimentality - indeed, that can be taken as a two-word summation of both Harper’s character and her performance. Playing a middle-aged literature professor who has responded to her sickness by trying to drink herself into oblivion, Harper chews up the scenery, swilling gin and quoting poets.

If she seems more cardboard cutout than flesh-and-blood, she’s not the only one. Jordan’s son (James McDaniel) is introduced as an angry man who fled the farm and married a big-city gal. He spends most of the movie angry and uncomprehending while his wife (Penny Johnson) is busy being selfish and uncaring. Until, that is, the moment near the end when they undergo a miraculous transformation. Since the movie leaves all the blanks for us to fill in (about why he’s the way he is, she’s the way she is, and why they both change completely in an instant), who they are and who they become seem less a matter of human experience and more one of plot necessity.

As befits a movie titled “The Road to Galveston,” the real pleasures are all the little passing moments along the way. In this way, the filmmakers have created a celebration of driving through Texas. Scene after scene is filled with the beauty of Texas’ grasslands and coastlines. Perhaps the most memorable scene comes when the beach-bound women stop along the way to run through a field of wildflowers.

And through the genuine highs and the histrionic lows of “The Road to Galveston,” Tyson endures with a dignity and grace so easy and natural it seems to be something more than acting. But then, that’s what acting is supposed to do.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “The Road To Galveston” airs tonight at 9 on the USA cable channel. Repeats Feb. 4 at 6 p.m. and Feb. 10 at 1 p.m.

This sidebar appeared with the story: “The Road To Galveston” airs tonight at 9 on the USA cable channel. Repeats Feb. 4 at 6 p.m. and Feb. 10 at 1 p.m.