THE NEW YORK TIMES:

The Arts

TELEVISION REVIEW

Filling the Nagging Gaps In an Adoptee's Life Story

In Reno's fantasies, she was born in Dull City and shocked the doctors there by emerging from the womb in a clown outfit. Then she tried to communicate with her puzzled mother, Mary Tyler Moore, who just couldn't see her daughter for what she was: funny.

In reality, Reno, the performance artist, was born in New York, adopted in infancy by a Long Island couple and reared in what she now sees as a suburban vacuum. "Reno Finds Her Mom," a 90-minute film on HBO tonight, is the story of her search for the woman who gave birth to her.

Reno's performance style has been described as loud, freewheeling and chaotic, and so is the beginning of this story. But it quickly becomes a linear narrative, told in cinema verite and spy-camera style, punctuated with excursions into fantasy (with Ms. Moore, with Lily Tomlin as her fairy godmother, with cartoon elephants and with Reno as a noirish male private eye). The fantasies are completely unnecessary; despite Reno's insistence on those and other comic interjections, this is a compelling, well-told story.

Reno battles bureaucracy and sealed-records laws for ages, finally discovering the mother's real surname and birth date, fascinating information about her situation (for one thing, she was engaged to a young man who was not the baby's father), and that she was of Spanish and German descent. An adoption-agency worker accidentally reveals the mother's first name, Silvia, but the search soon hits a snag because some of the earlier information turns out to be wrong. Reno calls in two private detectives who tell her they have 50 years experience between them and ask for $5,000 up front. Finally, she turns to "the secret guy," a clandestine investigator who works through a third party and finds the mother in 48 hours. Name, occupation and current street address for only $2,500.

The woman declines to have her first meeting with Reno filmed, a welcome demonstration of good judgement. (Keep in mind that after she gets a telephone call saying, in essence, "This is your 40-year-old illegitimate daughter calling," she next receives one that adds, "Oh, by the way, I'm making an HBO movie about all of this.") Viewers see only Reno's reactions to the encounter. Before meeting with her birth mother, Reno observes, "This is intense, isn't it?" Afterward, she reports to her friends, "She said, 'You look just like your father.'"

Reno does receive one piece of bad news. She used to hypothesize about her biological mother on and off stage, and always said that the only thing she wouldn't be able to take would be finding that her mother was a Republican. Silvia is. Reno is handling it.

THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER:

I want my mommy.

As adults, we still carry that primal cry for comfort inside. And here comes comedian Karen Reno to the rescue. Reno's search for a motherly hug plays out in extraordinary fashion in a hip, hot autobiographical documentary "Reno Finds Her Mom," premiering Monday on HBO. Lily Tomlin and Mary Tyler Moore also appear.

If you crave smart documentaries, this one can't be missed. Reno, an out-there New York performance artist, is adopted. Her search for her birth mother - stymied at every turn by New York's finest bureaucracy - is heart-grabbing, scary and joyous too.

Adopted by a white Long Island couple, dark-eyed, wild-haired Reno always felt out of place. Is her heritage Cuban, Jewish, Catholic, Puerto Rican? She turns the camera on herself in her sometimes desperate search to know, enlisting a mysterious adoption detective to track her mom. Eventually she finds her - in Tarzana.

But the journey is what's important. Autobiographical documentaries can so easily go maudlin. Reno, who produced the program with producer/director Lydia Dean Pilcher, keeps this one honest and direct. Yet outspoken, often graphic Reno always stays way in your face.

For craft alone, "Reno Finds Her Mom" is tops, neatly meshing verite footage with inventive fantasy sequences and black-and-white "spy-cam" views in the bowels of New York's Bureau of Vital Statistics. Reno pops up often as a Sam Spade-styled detective, speaking directly to the camera. Tomlin plays Reno's imaginary godmother with Moore as Reno's imaginary adoptive mother. There are scenes from Reno's stage performances, too.

In all, wacky, vibrant "Reno" is a stunning hybrid. It crafts fiction to serve fact. It is innovative television that works.

MIRABELLA:

Reno Finds Her Mom The brashly entertaining New York performance artist gets serious when she decides to track down the woman who gave her up for adoption at birth. Reno serious is still startlingly funny; you just get to cry between jokes. Airing on HBO in May.

THE WASHINGTON POST

You think you've had it up to here with roots stories, identity stories, find-out-who-I-am stories. You hear that the solo performer-comedian Reno-yup, only one name-has made a film about her search for her birth mother, and you think: Oh no. But then you watch the film and you have to think again. The HBO special "Reno Finds Her Mom" is proof of the fact that although there may be a limited number of stories in this world, there are limitless ways of telling them, provided the teller is inventive enough.

And inventive Reno certainly is. She's a brash, loud, frenetic, say-it-all and say-it-fast woman with hair dyed super-blonde with intentionally showing roots-the kind of performer-comedian you either go for or you don't. She's made a name for herself over the last decade, doing her solo act first at small downtown New York spaces and later in more mainstream venues such as Lincoln Center's Serious Fun Festival and at the Joseph Papp New York Shakespeare Festival. Her first HBO special, "Reno in Rage and Rehab," was shown in 1989. "Reno Finds Her Mom" airs at 2:40 a.m. on Mother's Day (originally scheduled for prime time, the hour was changed due to the abundance of profanity) and again tomorrow at 10 p.m.

After Reno does a show in San Francisco, a shrink who'd been in the audience invites the performer to her house for a drink. Rather than cocktails, the shrink dispenses unasked-for advice: "You know, Reno, it's one thing on stage. But in real life, a person should be able to get to the end of a sentence." The shrink tells her she's got two problems-one is attention deficit disorder (drugs are recommended); the other is that she doesn't know her beginnings. The prescription for the latter: a search for her birth mother.

Reno and Lydia Dean Pilcher, her co-producer and director, manage to make the quest by turns funny and poignant, switching between documentary and fictional sequences, color and black-and-white, live action and animation. Fittingly, the film goes into grainy black-and-white when Reno visits the suburbs she abhors to see the parents who raised her (they're so sadly frail at this point in their lives that your heart immediately goes out to them and you want to yell, "Put the camera down, for God's sake").

The alternate-reality fantasy sequences use wonderful drawings and no less a figure than Lily Tomlin, who acts as a sort of spirit guide to Reno on her journey ("Remember, Reno, you're only looking for your beginnings, not creating your past"). Clearly, Tomlin is also something of a mentor to Reno in real life: Reno pays homage to Tomlin by making great use of an old '70s Tomlin skit called "Dull City," and Tomlin is one of the show's executive producers. Another star turn is provided by Mary Tyler Moore, basically reprising her role as a mother of an adopted child from the movie "Flirting With Disaster." She plays Mrs. Reno in the fictional sequences, and to great comic effect-after all, one arched eyebrow from Mary is worth a thousand words.

Reno combs through New York City birth certificates on microfiche and knocks on the doors of various unhelpful bureaucracies, alternately edgily elated (when she finds another clue-her "real" name, her mother's birth date) and tearily furious (when she's stonily denied information by uncaring or supercilious flunkies at hospitals and government agencies). She and a small phalanx of colleagues get into private investigator mode, hammering away at the phones, keeping lists of leads on a central blackboard, sifting thorough shreds of "evidence" as they slowly mount up. Finally she enlists the aide of a real private investigator, someone she heard about at an Adoption Underground conference, and he quickly leads her to her birth mother.

Mom turns out to be alive and well and living in Tarzana, Calif. Poor Reno-more suburbs. She leaves her beloved New York to trek out West in search of her lost identity, but this section is a bit anticlimactic. Since Mom refuses to have her phone calls or her meeting with her questioning daughter recorded, we see only a fleeting glimpse of her and hear only Reno's side of the conversations. But the film's payoff moment comes as Reno reflects on finding her mother, concluding ruefully that it didn't really change her life very much at all.

She goes back to her other mother's suburbs and has a real heart-wrencher of a scene. Mrs. Reno listens as Reno tells of finding the birth mother. The failing woman in the invalid's bed asks, in her wobbly voice, how this has affected Reno's feelings about her. Reno replies, "You know, I don't really call her my mother, Ma.... You raised me, you're my mother."

The old lady, quietly but firmly, says: "Good."

THE STAR-LEDGER:

Reno (she uses just her last name) is a successful comedienne who is haunted and obsessed by the knowledge that she was adopted at birth and has never known anything at all about her birth mother, has no idea about her origins, who she really is.

How can she get the answers to these questions? Just as important - does she really want to get them, to open up a new chapter in her life, one that might leave her even more torn apart and/or angry?

The cult-favorite performance artist, with the dedicated help of her filmmaker friends, finally decides to make that search, wherever it takes her, and to make a film about it every step and setback along the way. The results are something painfully, sometimes hilariously revealed in tonight's Home Box Office docu-comedy, "Reno Finds Her Mom." And what we have here is a hypnotic 90-minute film that is part psychoanalysis, part road movie, part ego trip.

Along the way, we learn more about Reno's insecurities and hang-ups than we might ever want to share with her, and find out we aren't the only ones who are tormented and frustrated by the stupidity of what should be simple bureaucratic procedures.

The film combines hidden-camera cinema verite, scenes of Reno performing onstage, taking out her anxieties on her patient, understanding friends - Mary Tyler Moore and Lily Tomlin. Moore plays Reno's adoptive mother, and Tomlin (one of the documentary's executive producers) plays Reno's imaginary godmother, who pushes her into completing her quest whenever she is ready to chuck it all.

It's obvious from the film's title that the search for Reno's birth mother eventually succeeds. However, even then, her concern is compounded by the fear that this woman who surrendered her at birth might not want to be found.

The exhaustive way Reno finally gets there and the sea of red tape she has to wade through flesh out this story and make it even more attention-holding. So we hang in there with Reno, rooting for her to win, resisting the urge to bring her back to reality every once in a while, impatient to learn the end game.

We certainly won't detail the final flood of emotions Reno undergoes once she accomplishes her goal, nor will we reveal what happens when she tells the woman who has raised her throughout her life. It all eventually falls into place, however, as Reno fills in this missing chapter in her life and is finally able to move on.

She insists throughout that she has done what she had to do - not to make a movie, but to find out who she is and where she came from. And although we may doubt it at times, we accept that truth. Tonight's film is an added bonus.

PAPER :

Reno left the suburban suffocation of her Long Island upbringing at 16 and never looked back-until now. The comic bombshell, who is best known for her politically charged monologues, as well as for her dreadlocked dog, Lucy, who accompanies her everywhere, is back on the boards with a new show, Reno Finds Her Mind, and a new film project, Reno Finds Her Mom, which chronicles the search for her biological mother.

It's not easy to make a movie about adoption that doesn't turn into a sappy mess. But Reno was never one to confirm expectations-or shy away from confrontation-and in the process, which included a residency at the prestigious Screenwriters Lab at Sundance, she emerged from this two-year-long odyssey with an intriguing new genre of filmmaking that combines verite and narrative elements.

Reno describes her primary concern with this film as an attempt to distance herself from the "serious" documentary pack. "When I first wrote the proposals, I called it a docu-comedy," she says. "But documentary is not a playful word. The word document brings up all these really bad associations for me, you know, like George Washington and bad plumbing. Parchment.

"Why do they have to be so un-art?" she continues. "It's like Cheetos. They're so incredibly delicious, but if you leave them out even for two hours, they absorb all the moisture and they're limp. That's the connotation documentaries have in my mind: limp, unexciting, anticlimactic, always showing the naked body, not the slip."

Interspersed throughout Reno Finds Her Mom are scenes from the Renos' Long Island home, footage of Reno conducting an on-the-street poll about her origins, flashbacks to the real events (with Mary Tyler Moore as young Reno's tight-lipped, WASPy adoptive mom) and a series of cleverly animated sequences by Janie Geiser in which Lily Tomlin appears as her guardian angel/advisor.

Directed and produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher (Chinese Box), the film was scheduled to appear during prime time on HBO on Mother's Day, May 10, but when the folks at HBO screened the final version, they counted 22 "fucks" and promptly placed it in the after-midnight time slot.

One of the few funny films to seriously take on the subject of adoption, Reno Finds Her Mom seduces with its casual frankness and no-holds-barred approach, but the larger questions about identity, privacy and this country's adoption policies are haunting. Best of all, the film buzzes with the edgy bravado that comes from living one's personal life in public.

NEW YORK POST:

The one we'll remember for the longest time, takes one very funny, very profane New Yorker on a genealogical scavenger hunt that begins with what therapists call an elephant and leads through the bowels of Big Apple bureaucracy to a biological mother in the manicured suburbs of California.

Not all endings are happy, but the worst moments are not belabored.

That also could apply to "Reno Finds Her Mom" (10 p.m. tomorrow on HBO), a "docu-comedy" that is as quirky, unpredictable, inventive and (nearly) uncensored as the comedienne and performance artist herself.

Though we never see the woman who gave Reno up for adoption, we see her frail adoptive mother and her loopily uptight "stage mother," played with straitlaced abandon by Mary Tyler Moore.

Lily Tomlin, one of "Reno's" executive producers, appears as Reno's fairy godmother in delightfully animated sequences and as herself on the set of "Murphy Brown," where Reno seeks her out in a state of emotional and ethical extremis.

She and her Rasta-styled dog have beat their fists against the wall of the agency that handled her adoption, the city Bureau of Vital Statistics, a couple of detectives who don't want to cooperate with the film crew we come to know and like, and the woman who puts them in touch with the man who takes a lot of money before he gives up the name and address of Reno's mom, now living in Tarzana, Calif.

Reno, who'd imagined herself descended from many different stocks, never imagines herself the spawn of a Valley woman.

"I don't like this way of living...I don't wanna be suburban," she rants just before parking opposite the building in which her mother lives.

Later, in a rush of emotions loosed in a parking lot, Reno tells of the fateful meeting with the woman who is both fearful and open.

Reno recalls how she was told, "I'm delighted to know you. I really want my kids to meet you," and how she replied, "Most mothers don't want their kids to meet me, particularly their daughters."

At the end of an engrossing 90 minutes, Reno goes back to her adoptive mother, who wants to know: "How does this affect your feelings to me?"

Everything is said in a hug that's much bigger now that Reno doesn't have to get her arms around the elephant to get to the woman who raised her.

It's a hug big enough for us to feel.