‘Noah Dearborn’ May Make Viewers Long for the Simple Life

A lot of Sunday evenings are ruined by mounting dread about the next morning’s return to the rat race. This Sunday, though, CBS offers a balm: a back-to-basics reverie called “The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn.”

Sidney Poitier stars opposite Dianne Wiest and Mary-Louise Parker as a rural Georgia woodworker whose old-fashioned ways keep him remarkably fit and young-looking at 90-plus. He lives without electricity and does all of his work--in which he takes inordinate pleasure--with hand tools or foot-pump devices. Modern life intrudes, however, when developers try to push him off his farm so that they can slap down a mall.

Wiest plays a folksy restaurant owner who, like many of the locals, is fond of Noah. Parker is a big-city psychologist who arrives to evaluate Noah’s unconventional behavior for her developer boyfriend, played by George Newbern. Beguiled by Noah, Parker taps her inner Luddite and proceeds to glow like a country sunset.

The story is refreshingly out of the ordinary, the cast to die for, especially Poitier, who conveys a power that is all the more remarkable for its very stillness. But what begins as a charming and almost magical folk tale eventually loses the courage of its convictions and turns disappointingly formulaic. Sending mixed messages about hard work and solitude, it also leaves us wondering what its bottom-line message is supposed to be.

Even so, “Noah”--written by Sterling Anderson and directed by Gregg Champion--probably will leave viewers longing to slip free of the shrieking city and its modern pressures. If both work absences and rural-retreat reservations are up on Monday, we’ll know why.

* “The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for younger children).