TV Reviews : ‘Sickness and in Health’ Tale of Love and Betrayal

Letting go in love and marriage is the looming lesson dramatized in the CBS movie “In Sickness and in Health” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8).

A wheelchair-bound housewife (Lesley Ann Warren), suffering from multiple sclerosis, is shattered to discover that her loving husband (Tom Skerritt) is having an affair with the vibrant young caretaker (Marg Helgenberger) hired to look after her.

The cleansing thing about fiction is that it can reorder the messiness of life, and in this teleplay by Alan Hines and Joyce Eliason (from a story by Hines), a worst-case scenario ends, if not happily, on the most healing note possible.

Set in a small Texas town, the story develops too slowly, but when dramatic conflict does finally erupt halfway through the movie, the characters (including a guilt-ridden teen daughter nicely played by Robin Lively) have all been established as decent people entangled in deceit. Foremost is the lust that roars behind the back of Warren’s sweet and ailing wife.

This oft-told woman’s tale, in which the other woman is the best friend, is heightened by the ultimate heroism of the anguished wife. Under Jeff Bleckner’s direction, Warren catches the wife’s bittersweet dependency as she moves from sexual guilt over her dysfunctional body through a furious sense of betrayal to an almost beatific stance--a resignation that captures the big picture so hard to grasp in real life.