It's bonding time in PBS' 'My Boy Jack'

"My Boy Jack," a "Masterpiece Classic" presentation premiering Sunday on PBS, owes its existence to the actor Edward Herrmann having once suggested to the actor David Haig that he resembled Rudyard Kipling. From that slow-germinating seed, Haig eventually wrote a play about Kipling and his son, John, who died in the First World War just after his 18th birthday, and that eventually became this film.

It is sumptuous in the way one wants these English period pieces to be, with green countryside, good contemporary detail and scenes filmed at Kipling's own house in Sussex. The source material limits it as a story somewhat, but the scenes play well and are full of nice human moments. It's an actors' picture -- not surprising, given the author's day job.

Perhaps best known here, to the extent he's known here at all, as the blustery Det. Inspector Derek Grim in the Rowan Atkinson police sitcom "The Thin Blue Line," Haig has written himself a good role, with room to be big, small, broad, subtle, sincere and self-deceiving. (And he does resemble Rudyard Kipling.) He has clearly thought Kipling through: It's difficult to re-create any actual person's inner self, but the bigger the real-life model -- and the more experts there are to cavil -- the more crucial it is to base the interpretation on the facts.

The other characters -- Kipling's American wife, Carrie (Kim Cattrall, quite good); daughter Elsie (the excellent Carey Mulligan, recently of "Northanger Abbey"); and son John/Jack (Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself) -- are more pliable; they bend to the needs of the story. They've been conceived to create conflict that may not have existed in the genuine Kipling household but allows Haig to move ahead with dialectic -- the positive-negative charge that makes the picture move. This isn't a biographical film so much as a family drama into which historical figures and events have been folded, and which might apply to other fathers and sons and other families in other wars. (You could call it timely, or timeless.)

John wants to join the military -- war is in the air, all his friends are enlisting -- but is rejected for his terrible eyesight; Kipling is his booster and not entirely welcome coach. "I can't bear being gee'd up and encouraged," John tells Elsie.