Odd Couple Share an Odyssey

They are two people who need someone to listen: a young college woman whose literature quoting and spiritual journeying aren’t always taken seriously by those around her, and a 75-year-old man whose high blood pressure and tendency to talk to himself have his children treating him like a toddler.

They meet by happenstance and find a sympathetic ear in each other, a sweet premise. They end up hitchhiking across the country together, a rather bizarre twist.

As the truck driver who gives them a lift says: “If you don’t mind me saying, you’re kind of a peculiar pair to be hitchhiking.”

If not for Jack Lemmon’s wonderfully modulated performance, “The Long Way Home,” airing Sunday night on CBS, would be pretty much dismissible--and not just for its improbability. It hints that America is squandering its youth and its elderly, an issue well worth considering. But it otherwise reduces every thought to a warmed-over platitude: Life’s not over till it’s over, live each day to its fullest, etc.

The story begins in Kansas, where widower Tom Gerrin (Lemmon) has been forced by his children to stop working, sell his belongings and move in with a son and daughter-in-law, who fuss over him and shake their heads at what they interpret as diminishing vital signs. Meanwhile, college student Leanne Bossert (Sarah Paulson) heads off on a cross-country drive--in the Mercedes convertible her father gave her--to her home in Carmel, Calif.

They meet when Leanne almost hits Tom as he crosses the road, and they remain together because of increasingly absurd circumstances, including a pursuit by a pair of randy rednecks that leaves them in a ditch at the side of the road, rendering the car undrivable.

They turn up their thumbs to hitch rides (Tom decides he’ll head along to California to visit an old girlfriend who has written to him out of the blue), but for viewers, it’s thumbs-down for most of the rest of the way.

Lemmon displays Tom’s easy warmth while hinting ever so subtly at the past remoteness that has alienated three of his four children. His craft is as superb as always: The emotions that play across his face as Leanne casually discusses her sex life make for a short movie unto themselves.

Paulson gives an engaging performance as a woman who’s full of life and, in her youth, just a bit full of herself as well. And Betty Garrett delivers a winning cameo near the end as the old girlfriend who--delighted and dazed by Tom’s whirlwind visit--wonders what might have been if only the right words had been spoken years before.

Yet there’s only so much these fine actors can do in director Glenn Jordan’s version of William Hanley’s screenplay, which is based on a French TV movie. (What, we can’t come up with our own pablum? We have to steal it from the French?)

* “The Long Way Home” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2). The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for younger children).