TV REVIEW : ‘Incident’ Packs Environmental Punch

“Incident at Dark River” deals with an environmental problem: Mike Farrell plays a father who seeks to bring a corporation to its knees for causing the lead-poisoning death of his little girl.

The two-hour movie (tonight at 5 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. on the TNT cable channel) is fictional, but its single human tragedy dramatizes a dire topical theme. This isn’t a disaster film, but the ghosts of Valdez, Chernobyl, Bhopal and Love Canal hover over the little river here, where a nearby battery factory dumps its toxic overflow. Lead, mercury and acid gurgle into a picture-postcard river where the story’s victim likes to frolic on the shore with her raggedy doll.

Farrell (who co-executive produced and co-wrote the story) convincingly mirrors an ordinary family man whose grief is galvanized into anger when he traces his daughter’s death to the toxic waste dumping behind his house. What lifts the scenario beyond a David-and-Goliath yarn, however, is that the father has to fight the whole community, because livelihoods in the town are entwined with the factory. Hey, it’s terrible about the kid but car payments have to be paid.

Even the man’s wife (Tess Harper) gives him a hard time, in a secondary plot that intelligently dramatizes a husband and wife’s terrible separate needs in a time of crisis and loss.

The production uncranks slowly but there’s a lot going on besides a man’s lonely battle with a heartless company. With telling jabs, Albert Ruben’s script skewers the Environmental Protection Agency, ridicules the concept of a local free press (the daily newspaper is in the hip pocket of the money boys), and hammers a tough lesson at the father: It’s not enough to rouse the public’s social interest. “People need direction, they have to be led,” exhorts a staunch ally (a burnished performance by Helen Hunt).

A subsequent town meeting is anything but Capra-esque. But director Michael Pressman revs up the ending with a scene reminiscent of Peter Finch’s “mad as hell” outburst in the movie “Network.”

In truth, the real echo here is one of the first environmental plays ever written, Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” (1882), in which a whole town rises up against a good man for exposing a local tannery for polluting the water. There you have it: two identical idealists, hapless and bewildered, a century apart. Except that “Incident at Dark River” tells us we don’t have another 100 years to get serious.

The show will be encored over TNT Dec. 10 and Dec. 28.