In Search of Prestige With ‘Rand,’ ‘Wind’

A story to slit your wrists by.

That’s “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” the most orgasmic television movie ever, and one of the grimmest and least passionate, playing like a gathering of Mensa members alternatively having frosty sex and debating the objective relation between unconsciousness and existence.

After years of being Avis to HBO’s Hertz, Showtime this weekend renews its quest for No. 1 with a prestige double feature that promises more than it delivers.

Preceding Sunday’s Ayn Rand biography with Helen Mirren is “Inherit the Wind,” Saturday’s been-there/done-that new version of a famous courtroom drama, this time with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott in the showcase roles. This duel pits Darwinism against old-time religion in a quasi-embellished account of the blockheaded 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” which skeptic Clarence Darrow lost to Scripture-quoting William Jennings Bryan while winning the argument.

Bible-thumping, hymn-singing politician Bryan challenged the right to think independently.

Russian-born writer Rand, whose best-known novels are “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” demanded it even as she required rigid conformity from her followers.

By many accounts, Rand (who changed her name from Alice Rosenbaum) was an astonishing piece of work, a bitter, miserable despot who intellectualized adultery and meanness while spreading her gloom to those around her. That, at least, does resonate acutely in this movie that is based on a portion of Barbara Branden’s book, “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” detailing Rand’s 15-year affair with Branden’s psychologist husband, Nathaniel.

“The Fountainhead” had already become a movie with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and Rand was a prominent philosopher and Soviet-hating “radical for capitalism” struggling to complete her magnus opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” when Nathaniel and Barbara met her and her husband, Frank O’Conner, in Los Angeles as UCLA students in 1951.

The movie edges forward from there, with worshipful Nathaniel (Eric Stoltz) and Barbara (Julie Delpy) coming under the sway of Rand (Mirren) as members of her circle, and the cerebral and physical attraction between the middle-aged novelist and her youthful male protege supposedly ever growing.

Nathaniel and Barbara marry and move to New York, and the lustful Rand follows, dragging poor, pouting Frank (Peter Fonda) with her while insisting she must be there “for ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ for my vork.” Yet soon Rand and Nathaniel are whispering sweet profundities to each other and asking their spouses’ “permission” to have sex together one afternoon and evening a week.

Rand stonily tells Frank and Barbara: “This is not a threat to you. Our affair will be something separate apart from you and our normal lives. Lesser people could never accept this. But we are not lesser people.”

Instead of Atlas, Frank and Barbara do the shrugging. And so goes the story’s taffy pull between heart and intellect, which is never persuasive because there is nothing on the screen involving Mirren’s tightly coiled Rand and Stoltz’s pastel Nathaniel--no physical or brain chemistry--that makes their mutual magnetism seem credible. Nor is there any basis on the screen for Barbara’s ongoing devotion to the woman who wounds her repeatedly.

After directing that fine actress Mirren so effectively in Granada Television’s “Prime Suspect 1,” Christopher Menual has much less success here. More crucially, there is little in this teleplay by Howard Korder and Mary Gallagher that penetrates Rand the neurotic, orgiastic ogre and explains why she has attracted so many disciples through the years.

Even with cigarette smoke curling past her nose and her character’s unglamorous severity captured perfectly, Mirren is unable to liberate Rand from her silhouette. Her philosophies instead emerge as sound bites from “Atlas Shrugged” relayed in voice-over (“The world is not a product of your sins, it is a product of your virtues”) as she and Nathaniel copulate nude on the floor.

Rand died in 1982. Meanwhile, Showtime’s “Inherit the Wind” lives only intermittently. Most notably when Matthew Harrison Brady (Scott) is methodically broken down on the stand and impaled on his own arrogance by Henry Drummond (Lemmon) in tiny Hillsboro, Tenn.

It’s here--in a story drawn from the real-life Thomas Scopes episode--where science teacher Bertram T. Cates (Tom Everett Scott) is in trouble for exposing students to Darwin’s theory of evolution, finding himself charged with breaking a state law forbidding anything that “denies the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.”

On the attack is the Bryan-like Brady, a fiery orator and seething, self-righteous dinosaur whose gaseous, messianic preachings echo the rhetoric of some of today’s evangelists. Defending Cates is the Darrowesque Drummond, a brilliant Chicago attorney who fears religious fanaticism’s incursion into education and has an instinct for the exposed soft underbelly of his opponent’s logic.

Smirking and heckling his way through their courtroom war is cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck (Beau Bridges), who is based on H.L. Mencken.

Oft-told “Inherit the Wind” is serviceable but weary, with about the same strengths and weaknesses--a relevant debate weighed against periodic preachiness, indulgent acting and static pauses--as a 1988 NBC production with Jason Robards and Kirk Douglas. That followed an earlier NBC version, which came after a famous 1960 theatrical movie with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, which was spun from a 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.

This teleplay by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith, too, offers ample opportunity for overacting, and Lemmon (who revs up after a tepid start) and Scott partake liberally. As does Lane Smith as a fundamentalist preacher, a performance so over the top you can get whiplash just from watching. And director Daniel Petrie Sr. shows no inclination to rein them in.The production values also are flawed in spots. Here you have a muggy Tennessee summer, with half of those inside the supposedly sweltering courtroom fanning themselves liberally, and not even one droplet of perspiration visible anywhere.

For the record, meanwhile, Scopes, far from being an unknowing victim, agreed to teach evolution in his classroom to test the Tennessee law. And the jury was not even present when Darrow interrogated his adversary, Bryan, who died five days later, not immediately after the trial. And if Darrow did believe Bryan to be someone “of much greatness,” as Drummond says of Brady here, perhaps he meant his belly. Upon hearing of his death, Darrow was quoted as saying: “A man who for years had fought excessive drinking now lies dead from indigestion caused by overeating.”

To say nothing of overacting.

*

* “Inherit the Wind” airs at 8 p.m. Saturday on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).

* “The Passion of Ayn Rand” airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on the cable channel. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).