TV REVIEW : Magical Realism of Marquez’s ‘Miracle in Rome’

Some plots are ineffable. You can imagine Bob Newhart responding to a producer pitching the story line for “Miracle in Rome” (airing on “Great Performances” tonight at 9:30 on Channel 28, 9 p.m. on Channels 15 and 24):

“Uh huh. It’s about politics and religion and music,” repeats the Newhart character. “A little girl in a Colombian village dies and 12 years later comes back to life? ‘Sort of’ back to life. Her grieving father does what? He takes the girl’s body out of its crypt when he finds it hasn’t decomposed and flies to Rome and carries her around the Eternal City in a gigantic lunch box and gets rebuffed because the Vatican won’t canonize her? I see--the father turns out to be the saint.

“There’s an Italian operatic tenor in the story whose voice breaks glass? The daughter does what? She wakes up from a Snow White sleep with the Rome police at the door and her delirious father dances with her into the street and buys her an ice cream, and roll the credits?

“You say the writer, what’s his name--Gabriel Garcia Marquez?--creates a Latin American style called magical realism?”

Sublimely, effortlessly, and with a sense of grace, the answer to all the above is a beatific yes. “Miracle in Rome” (in Spanish with English subtitles), was embellished by Nobel laureate Marquez from a brief mention in his epic novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

It’s rare to see mysticism dramatized on TV but more uncommon to see the merger of the realistic and the fantastic negotiated with the light touch, the irony and the wit woven by Marquez and his Colombian co-scenarist and director, Lisandro Duque (who also appears in the film as the ambassador’s unctuous secretary).

As the father, Colombian actor Frank Ramirez invests the film with a sense of solitude as he and his opera buddy, dodging diplomatic traps, putter around Rome on a motorbike with a sidecar, the little girl prone in the big lunch bucket under his arm. It’s also a film that’s piquant and never morose. A subhead expresses its theme: “Love Makes Death Brief.”

A short film on Marquez following the movie makes the point that with Marquez, reality is imagination and dreams. “Milagro en Roma” follows that path.