If you search the Internet for the film "Journey", you won't be very successful in terms of getting usefull information. So I said to myself "why not review it?" - here you are.
"Journey" is a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production starring Jason Robards as the grandfather of "Journey", an 11 y/o boy, played by the ravishingly beautiful Max Pomeranc ("Searching for Bobby Fischer"). The narrator of the story (Journey as a teenager) tells us what he thinks the origin of his name might be: "Mama named me Journey: Journey, as of somehow she wished her restlessness on me. But it was Mama who'd be gone in the year that I was eleven."

Journey lives together with his sister "Cat" and his mother Min at her parents' farm in California. One day the boy's mother decides that she doesn't like it no more at this place. In a fierce conversation with her father Marcus, she leaves. She blames him for never letting her do what she wanted and states that she doesn't belong here. Marcus in turn says that all this is long ago and that she always blames other people for her mistakes. He ends the discussion with "you come and go like a visitor, that's not a mother's way". How right he is with that statement: Min leaves the farm without bothering to say "Goodbye" to the children.

The two siblings look at their mother's disappearance in different ways. Cat is angry, but kind of happy that she's finally gone, Journey is sad and believes that she will come back. Furthermore, Cat believes that Min didn't care about them, while Journey believes the opposite. This becomes quite clearly when Min's first letter arrives: an envelope without return address and two bundles of bills in it - some pocket-money for the siblings, but not a single word except their names tagged to the bundles, respectively. Here we can see how Journey fights against reality, against the fact that he has a lousy mother: he says that Min did write words ("I'm not disappointed, I'm not! There are words: our names are there, our names are words!") and that she just forgot the return address.

The second main theme of the film is the relationship between Journey and his grandfather Marcus. First he is aloof from him since he blames him for his daughter's "escape", but gets more and more attached to him in the course of the film. There is one hobby Marcus enjoys very much, that is making photographs. Journey doesn't like this hobby either at first, but later has to learn that his grandfather is making the photos for him to give him a family in pictures, to give him back the past. We see the boy's bad mood in the beginning when he is being offered to drive the car to town and he isn't comfortable with the idea at all. Can you imagine being 11 years old and not being enthusiastic about driving a car for the first time??

Another theme is Journey's "search" for his father, whose face he can't remember: a retrospection from the past always comes back to his mind where he was sitting on his father's lab as a baby, but couldn't see the face. This mystery is being solved by the end of the film, but I don't want to spoil it.
"Journey" is a very "calm" film, there are no action or dramatic scenes at all, but I wouldn't consider it boring since the story is very well told. It concentrates on the theme "family bonds". The main score theme is a piano piece, which I liked a lot.