Television

Vanessa Redgrave wanders through The Shell Seekers with red-rimmed eyes, as if a flood of tears lurks just beneath the surface, destined to never arrive. Stiff British upper lip and all that, which is a pity. Some good, old-fashioned histrionics would make this two-hour film a lot more entertaining.

Instead, The Shell Seekers, which airs tonight at 8 on the Hallmark Channel, aims at elegance and Redgravian restraint. It's Ian McEwan by way of The Bridges of Madison County, without enough of either to feel quite right.

Based on the bestseller by Rosamunde Pilcher, the story is told from the perspective of Redgrave's Penelope Keeling, an aging woman with a failing heart who made a tragic mistake, some 40 years in her past, by failing to use birth control. (An earlier adaptation, starring Angela Lansbury, aired on the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1989.)

Numerous times, Penelope's grown children say that she's eccentric and free-spirited, but maybe that's just in a British way, since she seems to spend most of her time quietly gardening and drinking tea.

She also does a lot of remembering, thinking back to various trysts of her youth, and to her father, a famous painter of bland landscapes played by Maximilian Schell. Back in the present day — which is actually the '80s, at the time of the Falklands War — two of her venal children are trying to get their hands on their grandfather's paintings and sketches, which they figure are worth a lot of money.

Penelope owns the art, and she resists, largely because she doesn't seem to like those children very much. When we meet their dead father in World War II-era flashbacks, we understand why. The soldier named Ambrose Keeling is a greedy lout who cares about cars more than art. So of course, while he's off at war, Penelope meets a handsome soldier who appreciates art and reads poetry aloud. He declares that he's going to marry her someday, and promptly gets shipped off to battle.

What happens next is predictable and speedy; because this film is edited down from a nearly-three-hour British miniseries, things happen too quickly to justify genuine feeling.

Early on, we see Penelope's other child, the free-spirited Olivia, shacked up with a handsome rich guy in a Mediterranean palace. Almost instantly, she gets a dream job and decamps to London; he promptly descends into a fit of grief and runs his boat into a rock.

At least he makes a pouty face while he's heading toward his doom. This movie only gives way to camp with its death scenes, including one so gloriously cheesy that it belongs in a different movie altogether. Perhaps director Piers Haggard handled Redgrave with kid gloves, thinking she's too accomplished to countenance much camp.