"Haven" is the sort of movie that thinks because it's about the Nazis, it needs to be three hours long. I submit that this is not necessarily the case. Three-hour movies should be ones that have three hours' worth of story to tell. "Haven" is more like a two-hour film, with a liberal amount of schmaltz sprinkled throughout to pad the running time.

It's a TV movie, originally aired in February 2001 on CBS, which might explain the padding. A three-hour film becomes four hours with commercials, making it easy to spread out over two ratings-rich nights.

Directed by TV-movie veteran John Gray and based on a book by the main character, it tells the true story of Ruth Gruber (Natasha Richardson), a Jewish woman who, as an assistant in the Interior Department in 1944, went to Europe to escort 1,000 concentration camp refugees to America.

Most of the film's first half is set on the military ship transporting the refugees. Tensions run high there, as the soldiers onboard don't like having to be babysitters. Besides, many of them don't like Jews anyway. In fact, that's a running theme through the film, the fact that the Jews were escaping Nazi Germany but were coming to a country that wasn't that keen on them, either (though, to our credit, we didn't institutionalize the killing of them).

The second half follows Ruth's continued attempts to get the refugees out of their "temporary" refugee camp and into mainstream society. She must work against the Powers That Be, however, portrayed as suited Washington bureaucrats who are smugly anti-Semitic and don't think FDR should be using so much taxpayer money to rescue foreigners from Eastern Europe.

Natasha Richardson is only slightly miscast as a Brooklyn girl with a honking accent. She appears in nearly every scene, so her strong-willed, pretty-but-not-in-the-classical-sense presence is a valuable asset to the film.

It gets bogged down quite a bit in flashbacks: Ruth recalling the years she spent in Germany attending college, refugees recalling their treatment by the Nazis before escaping, and so forth. And while I don't want to sound callous toward the real-life horrors that went on in those years, the way it's presented in the film feels shallow and generic -- the usual Nazi-era anti-Jewish scenarios you see in movies like this. The movie wants us to feel sobered and inspired simply because of its topic, not because of anything special it does in the handling of it.

THE DVD

The movie is divided into its two halves, each about 90 minutes long, recreating the way CBS broadcast it. There is also an option for "play all," which will play the whole thing as one three-hour flick.

VIDEO: Anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1), the way it originally aired on CBS. As is the standard nowadays for TV movies, it was shot as well as a lot of theatrical releases. There are optional English subtitles.

AUDIO: A pretty crisp Dolby Digital Stereo soundtrack, with an optional French track.

EXTRAS: Alas, no extras survived the perilous voyage across the sea.

IN SUMMARY

This is a well-intentioned film, to be sure. It is not told cynically or to yank unearned sympathy. But it takes a familiar story and tells it in the usual way, artlessly and without flavor.