“A Painted House”

Sunday night at 9 on Ch. 2

1/2

UNLIKE Stephen King, whose best stories are often the ones that have nothing to do with horror (think “Stand By Me,”), John Grisham is better when he sticks with the genre he’s been most successful with – troubled lawyers and crooked judges.

Sunday night’s Hallmark Hall of Fame debut of Grisham’s “A Painted House” is, unfortunately, not about troubled lawyers or crooked judges. What you will find are plenty of little tales about poor folks living on Arkansas cotton farm in 1952.

Yes, there’s a killing (not necessarily a murder), but it’s not central to the story and nobody investigates it. Instead, the movie from Grisham’s semi-autobiographical book of the same name has a family dealing with everything from the weather to fights among the migrant workers to the price of cotton to the impossibility of an extended family surviving the next year on a single harvest.

Grisham says it’s a conglomeration of stories he heard as a boy growing up for the first seven years of his life on just such a cotton farm. But the problem with “A Painted House” is that it’s so slow, your family (i.e., the kids) probably won’t hang around to watch it if you don’t duct tape them to the sofa first.

The movie opens in 1952 with 10-year old Luke (Logan Lerman) listening to his gramps (Scott Glenn) and his dad (Robert Sean Leonard) worry about cotton, the picking of the pickers, the weather and the possibility of ruined crops.

Along the way, there are a couple of fights and one of the workers is killed, somebody runs away with somebody else and there’s a tornado that doesn’t touch down.

What really doesn’t work is the feeling of authenticity. There’s the sharecropper with 7,000 kids of her own who has to call on Luke’s mom and gran to deliver her own daughter’s baby, hairdos that are straight out of the ’60’s – not the ’50’s – and pickers who remain so crisp and clean there must be a laundromat on the way back to the barn.