That Oprah Winfrey, she just loves the weepers. The Kleenex bill must have been astronomical for "Before Women Had Wings" (9 p.m. tomorrow on Channel 7), the latest movie from Winfrey's company, Harpo Productions. There's even one scene toward the end of this tale of Southern family dysfunction in which every single one of the four people on screen is crying so copiously that only a stone would fail to shed a tear with them just to be neighborly.

The good news is that she hired some good criers, including herself in the role of Miss Zora, the Comforting Neighbor With a Hidden Sadness. (Although Winfrey can sob with the best of them, she doesn't look too convincing in those denim overalls she is costumed in.) But Ellen Barkin, who plays the Troubled, Drunk and Abusive Mother, is the weeper extraordinaire here, a major, major crying talent. There is hardly a scene in which she is not going through significant trauma or inflicting it on others. Barkin is especially adept at the crumbling cry, the kind that begins with a look of pain, progresses to trembling, and then finally to the flat-out wail. That girl earned her salary twice over.

Sad to say, the script by Connie May Fowler, based on her book of the same name, is cliche-ridden and painfully sentimental, yet fails to rise even to soap opera standards by not resolving most of the story lines it sets out. The generally decent performances are not enough to really sustain this drama, which by the end has tweaked our emotions without, as they say nowadays, providing closure. In other words, you feel kind of cheated by the time the credits roll.

Advertisement

The story is told through Bird, a girl of 9 (appealingly played by Tina Majorino) whose life in 1960s Florida is pretty dismal. Her parents are a mess -- Dad (John Savage), a failed singer, is a wife-abusing drunk, and Mom (Barkin) is an attractive but unstable neurotic who can't seem to stop lovin' that man. "The twin evils that fueled my parents' anger were moonrise and liquor," Bird narrates. Do little girls really talk like that?

"Dreamin' is for fools," bitter mom Glory Marie warns her daughters, in one of this film's many examples of the dropped-g school of regional accents.

After Dad meets his inevitable final disaster, Glory Marie (that name!) takes her two daughters to Tampa, where they live in a trailer behind a motel. She works for the motel owner, who seems to have a yen for her, and starts drinking and smoking too much. She is a terrible mother -- unpredictable, violent, an emotional basket case. But wait! Here comes Oprah in a big ol' straw hat, ready to offer solace and wisdom to a hurtin' little girl. Bird defies her mother's orders to stay away from the suspicious "colored" woman and forges a life-sustaining bond with her noble neighbor.

Advertisement

The friendship between the two is really the best thing about the movie, thanks to Majorino's convincing little-girlness and Winfrey's cuddliness. Barkin's performance is certainly a tour de force, but she doesn't get to change much by the end. The movie, which is rated TV-14 because of violence, was directed by Lloyd Kramer with a 1950s Technicolor studio look and feel. This may place the sentimentality in an appropriate context but also adds a note of obsolescence. "Before Women Had Wings" is the first of six movies from the Winfrey workshop; if this is any indication of what's to come, stock up on hankies. CAPTION: Oprah Winfrey and Tina Majorino in the hankie-heavy family drama "Before Women Had Wings."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ2Fuhnh7kGpmaWlfl7Knu9GeZLCnnZq7brTAnWSwoZ6cwG7Ax56wZqulp7JusMidZJyqqWKubrjOrWaeapNqr6WFwGZrbmqTYoFxfMRmmZ5qlmKupYOTnGeemWSWg6N7