TV REVIEWS : All-Female Cast in See-Through ‘Lace’

What do you get when you cross John Cassavetes and Marianne Williamson? That scientifically inconceivable chemistry gets a brave but batty try in the TV movie “Chantilly Lace” (at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime), which has an all-star, all-female cast improvising dialogue in the service of determining a woman’s worth.

The improv is convincing enough, and the actresses strong and loose enough, that you may really feel like you’re eavesdropping on actual conversation. And that’s intoxicating, in spots. But the chat grows so self-consciously therapeutic in this see-through “Lace” that most voyeurs will want to go peep in another TV window well before the sex talk turns to taxing teariness.

Developed and filmed at Utah’s Sundance Institute, “The Big Chantilly” (or “Return of the Estrogenic Seven”) has a septet of actresses--JoBeth Williams, Jill Eikenberry, Lindsay Crouse, Talia Shire, Helen Slater, Ally Sheedy and Martha Plimpton--vacationing together at a mountain cabin three times in the course of one year.

(The only male cameo is a beefy, literally faceless pizza delivery guy who briefly becomes Williams’ boy toy in an unlikely celebration of reverse sexism in action.)

Performances fall in the good to terrific range, with an especially fine turn by Williams. But the rough outline that director Linda Yellen has given her cast to improvise over is too soapy for comfort: Slater has married Williams’ ex-husband, causing much tension. Crouse is also recently divorced and often hysterical. Eikenberry is an unhappy hausfrau contemplating an affair. As for the singles, Sheedy is deciding whether to come out as a lesbian, and Shire is a nun suffering a crisis of faith.

Inevitably, much empowerment ensues and female bonding cures all . . . except terminal illness. And the final 20 minutes, in which the remaining pals regroup to watch a farewell video made by the missing comrade, is a cry-fest manipulative enough to leave even the more weepy among us dry-eyed.

This is the sort of rare movie showcase that fellow actors tend to love--and with good reason, because opportunities for this kind of courage on camera don’t come along every day--but which most non-thesps are finally likely to find annoyingly showy. By the time Shire recovers her faith (in a New Age kind of way) and pronounces that God has told her “we all are one,” the telefilm’s audience will have subdivided many times over.