TV REVIEWS : Nun Faces Reality in ‘Body and Soul’

There was a time when Hollywood frequently made movies about religious subjects. Nuns and priests were particularly popular and were interpreted with unwavering fervor by many of the biggest stars of the day (Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Jennifer Jones, Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Bing Crosby).

That was then. Nobody would make a movie like “Going My Way” or “Song of Bernadette” today. On the other hand, nobody back then would have dared make a movie about a wavering nun standing naked before a mirror like the woman in “Masterpiece Theatre’s” four-part “Body and Soul” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24).

A 34-year-old nun who’s spent her entire adult life in a strict convent deep in the Welsh countryside is rudely dispatched into the real world to take care of family affairs after her brother is killed in a car crash. The nun’s first encounter in 16 years with modern British life (billboards, short skirts, magazines filled with sex, her first adult contacts with men) is poignantly established by British actress Kristin Scott Thomas as Sister Gabriel.

The luminous Thomas--who’s particularly effective in the nunnery scenes, where incredible silences and intense denial render conversation and touching taboo--reflects the pale beauty of an angel in a Botticelli painting.

But this miniseries, directed by Moira Armstrong and adapted by Paul Hines from a 1991 novel by Marcelle Bernstein, is really two alternating stories: one about the outer serenity and inner turmoil of an equivocating nun and the other a secular drama about the nun’s efforts to put her pregnant sister-in-law’s life back together and salvage her family’s floundering mill from the clutches of a scheming mill manager (the wonderfully callow, venal Anthony Valentine, who nearly steals the movie).

“Body and Soul” indeed. It’s a tale of a lust for life vying with spiritual vows, but told with a tone more calm than histrionic, eschewing melodrama and cheap sentiment.

Bristling Drama in ‘Emergency’

“State of Emergency” (at 8 tonight on HBO), set entirely in a public hospital’s war zone of an emergency room, is bristling advocacy drama about an urban health-care system in shocking disarray.

Hospitals have been the setting of so many movies and TV dramas that the subject may seem exhausted. But this crackling teleplay, based on the real-life experiences of a veteran emergency room physician (Dr. Lance Gentile), proves how rigorous and timely the form can be.

The plot is basic life-and-death material: A family man (Paul Dooley) suffers head injuries in a car crash on a downtown L.A. freeway (in a screeching sequence that sets the breakneck tone of the whole movie). All the city’s emergency rooms are shuttered except the understaffed, ill-equipped county hospital, where the traumatized victim is deposited in an atmosphere that resembles a hospital in Sarajevo.

Treated brusquely by the harried staff, he’s plopped unattended on a gurney for four hours as his condition deteriorates to the point where a doctor (Joe Mantegna) makes a moral choice to exceed his medical expertise and perform necessary neurosurgery. At risk is his job and the future of the hospital, which is in the midst of merging with a private management firm.

Director Lesli Linka Glatter, co-writers Gentile and Susan Black and Mantegna’s smoldering, foul-mouthed doctor give the movie a visceral, documentary-like urgency. Anyone who has ever set foot in the emergency room at County-USC will instinctively identify with the medical chaos here.

But be cautioned that the application of scalpels, medical saws and one flinch-provoking cranium incision are exceedingly graphic and unnerving.