MacLAINE’S ‘LIMB’ LEAVES NON-BELIEVERS HANGING

Watching “Out on a Limb”--Shirley MacLaine’s bizarre account of her pursuit and discovery of her “higher self”--is a little like looking at someone else’s wedding pictures. At first you’re intrigued, but after a while you start sneaking glances at your watch.

That’s one skeptic’s view, anyway.

Based on MacLaine’s best-selling book, this two-part, five-hour drama at 8 p.m. Sunday and 9 p.m. Monday on ABC (Channels 3, 7 and 10) is a combination love story/spiritual travelogue that scoots you off to stunningly filmed Hawaii, London, Stockholm and Peru.

It’s also an internal mystery--not a Whodunnit, but a WhoamI--in which MacLaine, as herself, asks the eternal question: “This can’t be everything, can it?” She finds the answer-- her answer--in realms usually associated with science fiction.

MacLaine’s story makes heavy demands on the viewer.

If you endorse her belief in trance channeling, reincarnation, out-of-body experience and extraterrestrials, then you may find “Out on a Limb” fascinating in spite of its uneven pacing and yawning, self-indulgent philosophical schmoozes better left to the printed word.

As for non-believers, MacLaine’s soaring out-of-body experience (“And then I was on my way to the moon”) may have them wishing for an out-of-room experience.

In either case, this Stan Margulies production is unique for TV, a handsome, well-acted autobiographical story that plays like fiction but isn’t fiction, according to MacLaine. She contends that the outrageous is fact. “It’s all true,” she said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Wednesday night. “Every bit of it happened to me.”

If so, then the outrageous is fact. If she imagined it all, however, then what’s the point? If she doesn’t have credibility, neither does the story.

MacLaine portrays herself as someone who came to believe in the immortality of the soul through slow exploration. She was no knee-jerk, blindly plunging faddist itching to become a cosmic cuckoo.

“Out on a Limb” begins 10 years ago when MacLaine had a gnawing emptiness while searching for truth beyond her enormous success as an actress, musical performer and author. Adapted for TV by MacLaine and Colin Higgins, the story’s first two hours are essentially about her affair with Gerry Stamford (Charles Dance), a married British politician with an eye on 10 Downing St. (she later discovers that they were previously married--in Atlantis).

It’s initially a sweet, if clandestine, romance that has its humorous side, as MacLaine sneaks around in sunglasses and various bag-lady disguises to avoid being recognized with her lover. Stamford is increasingly baffled by the intensity of her search for spiritual identity. They clash on things cosmic, and he ultimately picks family and career over MacLaine.

But that doesn’t happen until she has come under the influence of David Manning (John Heard), a young painter who believes that “everything happens like it should” and that “everything you want to know is right inside of you.” He becomes her spiritual “guide,” leading her on a journey to the Andes mountains of Peru, where clarity awaits and the elements of her life start fitting together like the pieces of a puzzle.

The performances are first-rate, although with MacLaine playing herself, one is never sure where the actress ends and the acting begins.

Gerry and David are both composite characters whose real identities MacLaine has not revealed. Gerry is better written, David coming across as smugly wise and tending to communicate in grating truisms.

It is high in Peru (whose gorgeous panoramic vistas lose their power and scope on the small screen) where David reveals that he has met an extraterrestrial who has changed his life. MacLaine initially rejects his “metaphysical twilight-zone mumbo jumbo.” But two incidents help change her mind about David’s trust in UFOs, one of them occurring when an unseen force guides their speeding truck down a curvy mountain road as David sits behind the wheel in a self-induced trance.

“Out on a Limb” has a fine, filmic look, and some of director Robert Butler’s scenes are so pure and uninhibited that they seem almost spontaneous. In one of them, MacLaine has a meeting with trance channeler Kevin Ryerson (played by himself), a sort of “human telephone” who puts her in touch verbally with a Jesus-era scholar named John and an Elizabethan pickpocket named Tom.

You would swear that Ryerson is in a real trance here. According to ABC, the scene was achieved by MacLaine, Butler and Margulies “prepping” John and Tom in advance of actual shooting. “And according to Kevin,” says the network, John and Tom “learned their lines by retrieving them from his subconscious.”

Whatever.

All of this may seem preposterous, depending on your perspective. You watch it trying to keep an open mind, hoping to share with MacLaine her revelations and exhilaration at unlocking the mysteries “of her very being.” But it just doesn’t transfer.

This can’t be everything, can it?