MOVIE REVIEW : ‘GOSPEL’--BLESSED WITH COMEDIC INSPIRATION

Look past that off-putting title, “The Gospel According to Vic” (at the Beverly Center Cineplex and the Westside Pavilion), and you’ll find a thoroughly winning movie, originally--and more felicitously--called “Heavenly Pursuits.” It is yet another of those inspired and gentle little comedies that are putting Scotland on the cinematic map.

Writer-director Charles Gormley was inspired by the very real scarcity of modern-day Scottish saints. Glaswegian Catholics, for example, waited four centuries for the recent canonization of John Ogilvie, who was hanged for his conversion from Presbyterianism to Catholicism.

Gormley imagines that in an older section of Glasgow there stands the Blessed Edith Semple Secondary School, attended by a shy but persistent young priest (Brian Pettifer) trying hard to come up with the two miracles needed to raise to sainthood the devout Edith, who restored sight to a girl blinded in a World War I munitions-factory accident. (No, says the Vatican, a 58-year-old woman’s pregnancy and a man’s third set of teeth won’t pass muster as miracles.)

Blessed Edith Semple Secondary is a highly contemporary establishment with a youngish, secular staff that is quite frankly lapsed. But what to make, in a credulous atmosphere stirred up by the priest, of a series of perplexing events? At the center of unexpected publicity is Tom Conti’s Vic, a man of boundless, shaggy wit and charm and a truly gifted teacher who manages an impressive breakthrough with some learning-impaired students.

Not since Leo McCarthy’s “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary” has there been a a comedy about Catholics so accessible and sunny without seeming either coy or prissy. The affair that inevitably develops between Conti and the school’s new, exceedingly cool and sultry music teacher (Helen Mirren) couldn’t be expected to pop up in a McCarthy picture, but Gormley shares with him that same generosity of spirit and compassion for human frailties. As a result, Gormley is able, in his beguilingly roundabout way, to make a case for leaving the door open at least a crack for the possibility of miracles in the face of all manner of bureaucratic skepticism.

Like those of every other country, Scotland’s films vary in quality, but Scottish film makers have an admirable resistance to pretense and actors with accents that are well-nigh irresistible. Conti, a native Glaswegian, and Mirren are as delightful as we would expect them to be, but their colleagues are no less persuasive. A special treat is the very pretty Jennifer Black, cast as a nurse, torn between her devout Catholicism and firm orders not to reveal a medical secret. “The Gospel According to Vic” (rated PG-13 for adult situations) is a kind of small miracle itself.