TV REVIEW : ‘Achille Lauro’ Centers on Personal Drama of Hijacking

Whether news or narrative, television is infinitely more comfortable showing the occurrence and impact of violence than examining its causes.

So “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro”--the NBC movie airing at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39--is a natural, transferring to the small screen both the action and emotional wallop of the 1985 terrorist incident that took the life of New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer.

The commandeering of the Italian cruise ship and the seizing of its passengers and crew by Palestinian fanatics constituted more than just a destructive tragedy at sea. It was one of those proliferating acts of hapless terrorism that have become all too familiar in the ‘70s and ‘80s, its only tangible result being the cruel and senseless death of an innocent man.

The emotional center of the script by Robert Collins (who also directed) is Klinghoffer (Karl Malden) and his wife, Marilyn (Lee Grant), for whom the cruise aboard the Achille Lauro is meant both to celebrate a 36th wedding anniversary and to enhance their limited remaining time together. He is in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed from a stroke and declining, and she is dying of cancer.

Collins obviously takes liberties, for there is no possible documentation for some of the private conversations depicted here. And NBC’s disclaimer about some characters and incidents being composites or fictionalized for “dramatic purposes” is too vague to be helpful.

Yet the story does effectively record the ship’s hijacking by terrorists, whose original plan apparently was to trade Israeli tourists for 50 other terrorists imprisoned in Israel. Since there were no Israelis aboard, however, the second choice became the handful of American passengers, dooming Klinghoffer.

As diplomats from various nations maneuver and debate negotiation points tonight, the hostages’ plight increases, and Klinghoffer is shot and thrown overboard after the terrorists’ demands aren’t met.

Collins nicely highlights the kinds of small, courageous acts by ordinary people that frequently go unrecorded in crises, and Klinghoffer and fellow passenger Stanley Kubacki (E.G. Marshall) are seen as particularly tough and defiant.

The performances by Malden and Grant are deeply moving; the enormity of Marilyn Klinghoffer’s loss and sorrow are simply overwhelming.

Yet “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro” neither adds to the record nor offers new insights. Instead, Collins more or less regurgitates that record, merely giving some dramatic resonance to portions of a story that have already been well reported. What’s more, he all but ignores the jurisdictional intrigues and political shell games and trickery underlying the ultimate capture of the hijackers and the escape of the man said to be their leader, the infamous Abul Abbas.

It was NBC News, ironically, that in 1986 performed an act of questionable ethics by securing a controversial interview with the fugitive Abbas with the promise not to reveal his whereabouts.

There are different shades of terrorism, and one cannot overlook that NBC’s movie arrives at a time when Israel itself has been charged by the State Department with increased human rights abuses against Palestinians in conjunction with the uprising on the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. But don’t expect a TV movie about that.

The Palestinians claim that their ever-mounting casualties in the uprising are the result of Israeli terrorism. The Israeli government maintains that it’s the uprising, or intifada , that’s terroristic, even though Palestinian stone throwers and gasoline bombers face a harsh and infinitely mightier foe in the Israeli army.

Whatever the verdict on that score, an event like the Achille Lauro tragedy is far easier to depict than a complex movement or a cause like that of Palestinian nationalism. Movies like tonight’s are made in part because the issues they depict--in this case an act of barbarism against unarmed civilian tourists--are an easy call, and the forces for good and evil are easy to identify.

For the same reason, there will surely be a movie about the recent terrorist bombing of the Pan Am jetliner over Scotland.

But the television industry rarely has the courage and vision to change course and make pioneering U-turns, so here is a prediction: Despite relatively steady newscast coverage, there will be no TV drama soon relating to the intifada , even though a good one could provide clarity and even though there are human stories and tragedies on both sides begging to be told.