A Shallow Take on ‘Confessions’

While it may be true that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, tonight’s Disney Channel movie “Tru Confessions” proves that it is possible to reverse the process (8 p.m.).

Based on the award-winning children’s book of the same name by Janet Tashjian, the movie manages to trivialize and trample the 1997 work’s delicate themes of living with a developmentally disabled family member.

Trudy “Tru” Walker (Clara Bryant) is a self-absorbed high school freshman whose irritation with her father (William Francis McGuire), mother (Mare Winningham) and twin brother Eddie (Shia LaBeouf) provides the sour centerpiece to the movie.

Eddie, whose disabilities were caused by being deprived of oxygen for a crucial few minutes at birth, is portrayed as an exuberant puppy of a lad whose clumsy antics, crying jags and loud outbursts exasperate the household. Nearly every scene involving him ends in anger and harsh words. But Tru and her parents are ultimately too involved with their own lives to dwell too long on the situation.

Then a video contest is announced by a local cable station, and Tru sees it as a way of furthering her career plans for becoming a TV personality. The fact that Eddie’s plight will be the focal point seems almost an afterthought. This is a steep departure from the book, in which the project was also seen as a means of bringing awareness and added research to developmental disabilities. This Tru is more worried about her classmates’ reaction to the video.

From the tinkling piano that accompanies what pass for introspective moments to the shallow burst of enlightenment at the end that attempts to pave over the wall-to-wall unpleasantness that has gone before, “Tru” simply rings false.