MOVIE REVIEW : REVERENT PROFILE OF ‘MOTHER TERESA’

On Sept. 10, 1946, a 36-year-old Albanian-born member of the Irish Sisters of Loreto, while traveling on a train to Darjeeling for a spiritual retreat, heard the call of God to work in the slums of Calcutta, where for nearly 20 years she had taught geography at St. Mary’s High School.

Forty years later, Mother Teresa estimates that she and the 1,650 members of her Missionaries of Charity have rescued 42,000 people from the streets.

With “Mother Teresa” (opening todayat the Westside Pavilion) film makers Ann and Jeanette Petrie have made a documentary worthy of their remarkable subject. Simplicity is the chief characteristic of their film as it is of Mother Teresa, whom they followed on and off for five years over four continents. So alive is “Mother Teresa” with humanity’s infinite possibilities for good in the face of evil and despair that it is exhilarating, offering a real lift to the spirits.

This tiny, lined, smiling old woman in her blue-bordered white sari, who handles her comparatively recent media celebrity with the dignity and effectiveness of Eleanor Roosevelt, has so much wisdom and faith that it’s a temptation simply to quote her in lieu of a review. “God speaks in the silence of the heart, and we listen,” she says in her husky-voiced, heavily accented English. “Each individual has been created to be loved.” It is with love that Mother Teresa, who has established 250 shelters in 60 countries, and her followers serve those most desperate in need around the world.

Hers is a hands-on ministry. Mother Teresa is as quick to embrace a leper as she is to cuddle a new-born baby. Because she is able to do this with love we’re able to view human suffering, of which this film offers numerous examples, in a new way. Those who so often repel us in fear and dread transfix us instead with the beauty of their responses to the missionaries’ tender care. A nun cradles a West Beirut evacuee, a cruelly crippled boy, his face twitching and eyes blinking in terror with hummingbird-like rapidity until he’s overcome with a calmness that allows us to see how handsome his features are; more than any other moment, this long, silent sequence sums up what Mother Teresa is all about.

In her caring for the wretched of the Earth, Mother Teresa provides us with a dizzying perspective on our problems, which must inevitably seem petty in comparison, and on our selfishness, too. “Poverty is not created by God, but by you and me. We don’t share,” she says, with her usual directness. Yet this woman who lives on a higher moral plane than most of us can even imagine is nevertheless tough-minded and humorous.

Perhaps inescapably, “Mother Teresa” (Times-rated Family) on one level plays like a recruitment film for the impressionable. Yet for every enthusiastic interview with one of the younger Missionaries of Charity, who must serve a 9 1/2-year novitiate before becoming full-fledged members, there are Mother Teresa’s frequent reminders that her life is a vocation that cannot be forced but must come “from above.”

The Petries and their crew, which includes narrator Richard Attenborough and gifted cinematographer Ed Lachman, whose latest credit is David Byrne’s “True Stories,” seem to have made this graceful, spontaneous film with the love that typifies Mother Teresa herself. Watching it, you cannot help but feel that it is the record of a woman who seems a certain candidate for sainthood. Yet Mother Teresa is also mortal. Five years ago she was told she had a serious heart condition but refuses to slacken her pace. “I never said no to Jesus,” she says, “and I’m not going to begin now.”