Ready for a 'Close-Up'

A mentally ill mother and her devoted son were the focus of the 1990 TV movie "Extreme Close-Up", which is a movie I had heard good things about in an Entertainment Weekly review and I had wanted to see it for myself. Redheaded Blair Brown played the mother, but not in flashbacks, in video footage shot by her documentary filmmaker wannabe son, David (Morgan Weisser, an actor I'd never heard of before). David nursed many wounds, including skin grafts and the grief that his whole family, including widowed dad Craig T. Nelson (always a great actor, I think), and two younger siblings, all felt since their mother's passing. Nelson's dad character resembled TV's Mike Brady, I thought. He was an architect and a single father, but in this case a recently widowed one, as well. Dinners were burned, clothes filled up the hamper and drinks with female colleagues felt awkward. Nelson did his best to avoid dealing with his wife's condition, but cried openly several times remembering what he'd lost, telling his son 'crying helps it heal.' For David, healing came in the form of examining the many tapes of footage of his mother he had filmed as part of his hobby. He spent his time looking at them trying to understand the depression and paranoia that robbed her of a happy life. David seemed to understand his mother's condition better than anyone, observing 'life is a dark alley sometimes.' She seemed to hear doorbells and expect visitors at the front door when no one was there and she became convinced someone was after her in the forest when she and her family went hiking.  David's friend Laura (Samantha Mathis, an actress I love who appeared in "Little Women" and "Broken Arrow", among other films) attempted to break through his grief to help him cope with his family's tragedy. Ultimately, he let her see and in the footage he captured, he himself was able to see the mother he had always loved, despite her illness. Without giving away the ending, I will say that the great Van Morrison song "Queen of the Slipstream", one of my favorites, can be heard not long before the credits roll.