Rue McClanahan’s Bit Role in Back to You and Me

You never wake up thinking today’s the day you’ll enroll in a free weeklong trial of a Christian streaming service to watch a Lisa Hartman Black movie. (At least I don’t, but I’m an agnostic Jew.) This morning I thought I’d shred the pile of papers in my office or re-caulk around the basement windows. Then I read a synopsis of Back to You and Me and laughed. Hartman (Valentine Magic on Love Island), a fifty-ish woman in 2005, attending a 20-year high school reunion?! Rue McClanahan’s her estranged mother? This required investigation.

That’s how I came to subscribe to UP Faith & Family, joining via Amazon Prime for the free trial. My wife found this development mildly alarming. Her parents were religious fundamentalists who didn’t allow her to listen to secular music or play video games other than Joshua & the Battle of Jericho as a kid. (Mavis Beacon also taught her to type; her dad misrepresented it to her as a video game.) They rejected most TV shows as unwholesome, with permissible fare including Touched by an Angel. An inspirational streaming service must have triggered flashbacks.

Happily for some, perhaps sadly for others, Back to You and Me is entirely devoid of inspiration. This is 85 minutes or so of the world’s blandest Malt-o-Meal, starring Hartman as Dr. Syd Ludwick. An internist (or so we are left to surmise), she toils unhappily at a big city hospital. When she’s sad about a terminally ill patient, her surgeon boyfriend derisively notes, “Your problem is you care too much.” Her nurse BFF Brenda (a majestically disinterested Jennifer Echols) disagrees — she wishes all doctors were more like Syd and less like the surgeon.

Brenda’s kicking back at Syd’s place when she notices an invitation to her 20th high school reunion. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to distance myself from that place,” Syd says of Bloomfield, the small town she hasn’t visited since her father’s death. She doesn’t elaborate, but after losing her patient she needs a change of scenery and decides to attend. Fiddles on the soundtrack alert us to a quaintness overload on the horizon. (Heavens to Betsy, the wildest boy in school grew up to be pastor full of gentle, homespun wisdom!)

I could bore you with the details of this Hallmark original movie, but it’s paint-by-numbers stuff you can already guess. There’s Gus (Dale Midkiff, also of Sins of the Mother), the old beau, now conveniently widowed, Syd left behind for medical school. There’s talk of “the big city” versus small town life. Gus even has a sickly son local doctors have been unable to help. “He acts a little old for his age sometimes, but he’s real insightful,” he offers. “They grow up fast these days,” the childless Syd remarks. You keep waiting to hear an old voice bust in with “Pepperidge Farm remembers!”

Of all the disappointments in Back to You and Me — chiefly, the lack of meaningful plot and character development — there’s none more irksome than its aversion to realistic conflict. A subplot involving Syd’s romantic rival, an old classmate who gets around (played by Barbara Niven), is spicy only to the Lisa Whelchel and Kirk Cameron crowd. Less forgivably, the film’s primary conflict, Syd’s years-long estrangement from her mother Helen (McClanahan), is such a bust that it drags the rest of the movie down with it.

The reasoning behind it is so incomprehensible that Helen herself is mystified. She feels the need to apologize but isn’t sure what she did wrong. “I’m sorry,” she tells Syd. “I’m just so sorry for whatever I did that’s made you hate me. I admit, I made a lot of mistakes. All parents do. But was I really that bad a mother, to make you want to leave, to run away from me?” Syd counters that Helen ran away from her, which only adds to her, and our, confusion.

Tom Amundsen’s teleplay (his screenwriting credits are a doozy) builds inelegantly to this: Syd’s an idiot. She wasted years nurturing nonsensical resentments of her mother following her father’s death. Had she ever bothered to articulate even the vaguest hint of her feelings just once, reconciliation with Helen could’ve come much earlier. That McClanahan looks unwell and gives the only credible, moving performance in Back to You and Me makes it worse. To root for Syd we must forget how she treated her lonely, baffled mother, but Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Streaming and DVD availability

Back to You and Me is out-of-print on DVD but available secondhand. You can stream it (as of this writing) through UP Faith & Family, which requires a subscription.

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… But wait, there’s more!

If you’re in a Golden Girls (or Maude, for that matter) kind of mood, we’ve got you covered. Rue McClanahan starred in a trio of family-centric TV movies in the early ’90s, all of which are reviewed here. Chronologically, they are Children of the Bride, Baby of the Bride, and Mother of the Bride. And in the late ’80s, Bea Arthur attended a high school reunion of her own in My First Love.