TV REVIEWS : ‘Sound, Silence’ Traces Bell’s Life

There was a time--in the 1930s and ‘40s--when fans flocked to see movies about inventors, such as “Young Mr. Edison” and “Madame Curie.” Now, resurrecting that abandoned genre, along comes a visually and scientifically absorbing Alexander Graham Bell opus, “The Sound and the Silence.” (It airs in two parts on TNT cable: the first on Sunday, at 5, 7 and 9 p.m., the second on Monday at the same times.)

Shot in New Zealand and at Bell’s storybook family estate on the coast of Nova Scotia, the movie should captivate science buffs, belle epoque fanciers and, most tellingly, the community of the hearing-impaired. Directed and written by John Kent Harrison, the story dramatizes in exceptional physical detail how Bell’s discovery of the telephone derived from his teaching oral speech to deaf children.

Bell’s compassion for the deaf begins with his partially deaf mother (“My Left Foot’s” Brenda Fricker), who constantly leans her temple against her son’s lips to “feel” his words. Helen Keller is one of his gifted students. Elsewhere, two hearing-impaired actors (Canadian Vanessa Vaughan and England’s Elizabeth Quinn) play the teen-age and mature Mabel Hubbard, Bell’s hearing-disabled wife.

New Zealand actor John Bach plays the remarkable dreamer Bell, who ages from an intellectually curious, mid-19th-Century Scottish lad to an almost godlike old man surrounded by a vast extended family swarming over his gingerbread seashore estate. In fact, Monday’s conclusion, which focuses on Bell’s awesome life after that first clear voice transmission via telephone (“Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you”) is the far richer of the two parts.