TV REVIEW : ‘Follow Your Heart’s’ Odd Family

“Follow Your Heart” follows the odyssey of a likeable drifter and an abandoned Vietnamese girl in search of hearth and home (tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

The TV movie, set in a Nevada cow town, is a leisurely family drama whose loping pace gathers into a deceptively tight knot. The rush of emotion in the concluding half-hour, which includes a near lynching, child assault and Western-style justice, hurtles the show from a slow grade onto a careening track.

Frances Sternhagen etches a distinct portrait as a widow rancher who takes in a floundering young man (Patrick Cassidy) who decides to kick back out West and finds the family he never had. That family includes an adolescent boy with the mind of a 5-year-old and that most overripe cliche of a little girl abandoned in his arms. The girl (Nichole Francois) is so genuine, though, particularly in her relationship with Sternhagen, that you don’t mind the hankie quotient.

Obligatory excesses, such as mayhem in saloons, mar credibility. But the writers (John Faunce Roach, Dan Fauci and Cynthia Whitcomb) have crafted a strong, edgy relationship between the crusty Sternhagen and her dim-headed son (Jace Alexander). Catherine Mary Stewart flavors the show with her looks but she hasn’t got much to do.