The Second Life Of Brian

By James Poniewozik

In 1971, the American Broadcasting Co. taught grown men to cry. ABC's Brian's Song practically invented the male weepie with its true story of Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) and Brian Piccolo (James Caan), the Chicago Bears runningbacks whose friendship ended when Piccolo died young; of cancer, in 1970. It was Love Story with a Y chromosome, plus a deep interracial friendship, and the network now promotes it as "groundbreaking," a "landmark" among TV movies.

So why remake it? The new Brian's Song (Sunday, Dec. 2, 7 p.m. E.T.) follows the original's playbook so closely that it never really answers the question. But it makes a few changes--good, bad and curious. Sayers (here, Mekhi Phifer) and Piccolo (Sean Maher) were bitter rivals before they were friends, and the remake does a better job showing how the flinchy, all-business Sayers, a born superstar, clashed with Piccolo, who compensated for his middling talent with hard work and disarming jokes. The update also looks more closely at the subtle prejudice the African American Sayers faced among his own team (along with overt public racism when he and Piccolo became the Bears' first interracial roomies). But it cuts a key scene in which Piccolo calls Sayers a "nigger" to get a rise out of him, an apparent sop to contemporary sensibilities. Phifer's Sayers is a tougher nut to crack than Williams'; as Piccolo, Maher is a charming wiseacre, but a little too sprightly. Caan's wry, macho Piccolo was a football player. Maher's is an especially buff comedian.

Like the original, this Brian doesn't stint on the melodrama: there's a wrenching scene of a dying Piccolo kissing his sleeping children goodbye; when he gets the bad news from his doctor, a thunderstorm is raging. The cues are a touch more sophisticated (e.g., the sound track uses Simon and Garfunkel's mournful Bookends Theme, rather than cloying orchestration), but the improved production values have mostly to do with advances in TV. The 1971 film often looks like an episode of Room 222; the 2001 film, like an episode of The Practice.

Anyway, the original's achievement had nothing to do with craft, subtlety or writing; it was all about blending humor, sports and unabashed sap to make guys unembarrassed to sob, at the precipice of the sensitive '70s. (A year later, football star Rosie Grier sang It's All Right to Cry in the seminal children's album Free to Be You and Me.) Brian's Song was wholly of its time, when football was a rising competitor to baseball, when the civil-rights struggle was fresh in the public mind, when men were redefining manhood.

Brian re-ducts may look better, but it's consciously a period piece--right down to the training montage scored to Cool Jerk--and its impact is less immediate. Thirty years and Jerry Maguire later, it's competent and affecting enough, but it's just another bowl game: not super, not subpar, just superfluous.

--By James Poniewozik