TV REVIEW : Honest-Looking ‘Mary Gray’

A childless farmwife, her sterile husband, his virile younger brother: Viewers are offered a typical sweeps scenario in CBS’ movie “The Fulfillment of Mary Gray” (9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8).

Surprisingly, a few atypical elements almost make the turn-of-the-century story work.

The honest look of the film is one of them. Shot on location in Texas, the surroundings look like places real people worked and lived long ago. The actors look authentic, too; even their clothes look lived in. There’s no Hollywood glamour treatment, not even for star Cheryl Ladd, who is excellent as Mary. Sans obvious make-up, her natural lean beauty shines, though it is often extinguished by fatigue and tribulation.

In the film, directed by Piers Haggard and written by Laird Koenig (based on a novel by LaVyrle Spencer), Ladd plays a vulnerable, honorable woman who is repulsed but then increasingly attracted by her husband’s request that his brother do what he cannot: make her pregnant.

Emotions get complicated. Husband Jonathan (Ted Levine) is jealous, Mary discovers a new passion and playfulness, and brother-in-law Aaron (Lewis Smith) falls in love. The wages of sin are costly, of course, and retribution is swift and final.

Levine and Smith don’t carry off their roles as convincingly as Ladd; Levine says things like “I’m not handy with words” and Smith is saddled with excessive angst about a man’s “needs.”

Ladd’s sensitive portrayal, and director Haggard’s attempt to keep sensationalism at bay, however, almost transcend the soap suds.