TV REVIEW : Can a Trusted Institution Avoid ‘Judgment’? : Television: Church bureaucracy structures shelter for itself and a fallen priest in HBO movie taken from life.

Can an institution whose very structure seems designed to provide accountability--to man and God alike--instead use that massive structure to avoid accountability through bureaucracy?

That’s the question asked by writer-director Tom Topor about the Roman Catholic Church in “Judgment,” an original HBO movie based on an actual incident in Louisiana involving a priest accused of molesting pre-pubescent altar boys. (It airs on the cable network tonight at 9.)

The molestation story is vivid, but the saga of one wayward abuser with a clerical collar very nearly pales beside the saga of the larger fabric in which he’s nearly able to lose himself.

In much the same way that Topor used his play “Nuts” as a soapbox to fire off rounds at the legal and mental health institutions, he’s using this drama--which in most ways resembles typical movie-of-the-week fare, not the stuff of theater writing--as a platform for a potentially devastating critique of the church in its most self-protective, institutionalized mode.

Ultimately “Judgment” stops a little short of the judgments it seems prepared to make, but the movie treads much farther than a similar treatment one of the big three networks would have dared--not just in its portrayal of the Catholic church hierarchy, but in the fairly graphic descriptions of abuse that the movie’s young principal victim eventually gives.

To our eyes, Father Frank Aubert (played by David Strathairn) seems like a shifty character from the start, only a little less nervous than Norman Bates, but no one in his parish has any reason to be looking for warning signs. And when little Robbie (Michael Faustino) starts having bloody bowel movements, making strange anatomical references around his sister and screaming about not wanting to go to church as loudly as devilish Damien ever did, his parents (Keith Carradine and Blythe Danner) are still agonizingly--but realistically--slow to catch on.

Families who’ve been through abuse cases may recognize some harrowing scenes here--the father who angrily forces the screaming boy toward his molester, unaware of what he’s been through; the irrational but crippling nighttime terror of the victim, and so on. If dramatically the film is a little slack (there are problems afoot any time a movie has a printed crawl explaining what happened to the characters substituting for a real climax), it still serves well as a vicarious vindication for those who’ve been through the trauma, and a subtly outraged warning for those who haven’t.