'Touching Home' is no home run

The most remarkable accomplishment of filmmaking brothers Noah and Logan Miller was getting Ed Harris aboard their soap-ish "Touching Home," in which they play twin brothers obsessed with playing big-league baseball. As their chronically reprobate dad, Harris is a trembling wreck whose addictions to booze and gambling are almost as pitiful as his dismay: How did I get here, he seems to be asking, and why do my sons not love me? They do love him, but with the damaged affection of kids who've grown up with a father-as-problem-child.

Harris brings a gravity to the film that the Millers can't possibly provide, either through their reality-based story or their performances - they are curiously unnatural actors, if oddly charming for it.

They're also not conventional heroes - Clint and Lane Winston (Noah and Logan) lack insight, a real grasp of their talents or an ability to consider their father from anything but the angle of personal injury. They're real, in other words, and thus a rare thing in movies.

"Touching Home" is not an unlovable film. It looks polished and moves at a brisk enough clip, considering all the small-town atmospherics the brothers seem compelled to impose on us. It might have been a different movie with different music. Seized up in a syrupy score right from the outset, "Touching Home" gets pegged as a Lifetime movie before it's gotten a chance to step up to the plate.