A&E; Will Air Superior Two-Part Version of ‘She-Devil’

Meryl Shmeryl, Roseanne Shmoseanne. It makes no difference.

The publicity-splashed new theatrical movie based on Fay Weldon’s novel, “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” pales beside an earlier TV version being rerun in two parts at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network.

The movie “She-Devil” aims for cheap gags, most of which self destruct.

The BBC television rendition, originally aired as a four-part miniseries in 1986, is at once more subtle and more bizarre. It is also much funnier than the movie, which stars Roseanne Barr of ABC’s “Roseanne” fame as the often grotesque-looking housewife who shrewdly and meticulously plots her revenge against husband-stealing Mary Fisher, the beautiful and predatory romance novelist played by Meryl Streep.

On A&E;, you get commercials, a small price to pay for the magic.

The movie has no magic. Streep, with her stylishly exaggerated portrayal of frilly heartthrob Mary, is responsible for its few good moments, while Barr affirms that, at this stage of her career, she is less an actress than a comic regurgitating lines. In this case, many of them bad lines.

From Mary Tyler Moore to Michael J. Fox, there’s strong precedent for TV sitcom stars switching art forms and making the transition to theatrical features. Adding Barr to the list of successes is premature, however. What works for her in the hit “Roseanne,” an atmospheric but plot-thin sitcom that draws life from wisecracked one-liners, does not necessarily apply to a full-length feature, even one of the low-burlesque genre such as “She- Devil.”

Ah, but TV’s “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil”--with diminutive Patricia Hodge as Mary and hulking Julie T. Wallace as Ruth, the passive victim turned victimizer--is grand, glorious nonsense.

As Ruth says, an “ugly woman” strikes back.

Sporadically narrated by Ruth (“You haven’t got him yet, Mary Fisher”), “Lives and Loves” is essentially a love triangle, with Ruth losing her philandering husband, Bobbo (Dennis Watterman), to the calculating Mary, a wildly successful pop literary figure who writes idyllic love stories and lives with her handsome male valet in a magnificent house on a cliff overlooking the sea. Living a life that superficially parallels the crescendoing trysts of her best-selling novels, Mary is every man’s desire and every woman’s envy.

With a large, hairy mole and discernible mustache above her upper lip, however, Wallace’s towering Ruth is neither desired--not even by her two children, it seems--nor envied. She’s a hunched, shapeless, 6-foot-2 advertisement for oppressed womanhood, a pitifully frustrated wife and mother eating herself into obesity in the suburbs as her accountant husband virtually abandons his family and openly cavorts with Hodge’s dainty Mary. Bobbo and Mary will pay.

For awhile, Ruth merely mopes and frets. Director Philip Savile opens gorgeously, for example, showing us Mary and Bobbo in intimate conversational foreplay at a cocktail party, while far in the fuzzed background, peeking from behind a waiter serving drinks, Ruth barely can be made out, watching the soon-to-be-lovers intently while gorging herself on chips.

Later, freed from her despair over Bobbo by the realization that she no longer loves him, Ruth channels her seething anger into retaliation, setting out, step-by-step, to destroy the blissfully co-habitating Mary and Bobbo.

Although Streep’s Mary is fully whipped up, embellished and magnified, Hodge is a minimalist here, initially cool, unflappable and refined to the hilt, playing her dissipating character in a nuanced, less-obvious manner that befits this more interesting BBC version, adapted by Ted Whitehead. Yet even Hodge’s understatement vanishes when total strangeness prevails in the last hour.

While Barr’s whiny Ruth is a narrow caricature groping for a laugh track, meanwhile, Wallace’s vengeance-driven Ruth is a woman of infinite looks and emotions, achieving a kind of madness and clarity of purpose in stages until finally being swept away by her own obsession.

“Oh, sweet vengeance,” she moans with ecstasy, sounding like a food addict contemplating French pastry.

In booting Bobbo and annihilating Mary, Ruth is methodical and merciless, assuming an almost fiery visage on the screen while being energized by her own hatred: “Peel away the wife, the mother. Find the woman, and there the she-devil is.”

Heading the she-devil’s agenda is a complete physical metamorphosis through painful surgery--a severe shortening of her legs and overhauling of her face--with the aim of remaking herself in the image of the much smaller and prettier Mary. It makes liposuction look like something you’d breeze through on a coffee break.

This wonderfully weird bit of business is absent from the movie, as are some of the more outrageous characters who come under the manipulative Ruth’s spell and serve her ambitions, such as a morally corrupt priest and a sexually perverted judge who is deliciously played by Bernard Hepton.

Given her transformation, there is a temptation to see in the new dominant Ruth a comic metaphor for the liberated woman (which appears to be “She-Devil” director Susan Seidelman’s vision). However, Weldon’s darkly humorous satire contains no underdog icons. This is not “Working Girl” and, it turns out, Ruth is no heroine, benevolent or otherwise.

Weldon’s characters are refreshingly bent. She pushes them over the edge, and you with them. Even with commercials, it’s a devilish experience not to be missed.