NEWS REVIEW: Mother Teresa TV biography is a mediocrity

c. 1997 Religion News Service UNDATED _ At some future Academy Awards ceremony perhaps, Oliver Stone’s four-hour, cast-of-millions epic “Mother Teresa” will win Best Picture for its unflinching, Kitty Kelley-like profile of the saint-to-be and Jennifer Jason Leigh will cop Best Actress for her savagely sensitive performance in the title role. Until then, we have […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ At some future Academy Awards ceremony perhaps, Oliver Stone’s four-hour, cast-of-millions epic “Mother Teresa” will win Best Picture for its unflinching, Kitty Kelley-like profile of the saint-to-be and Jennifer Jason Leigh will cop Best Actress for her savagely sensitive performance in the title role.

Until then, we have the curious case of “Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor,” a new Hallmark Entertainment production done in association with and airing on the Family Channel Sunday (Oct. 5, 7 p.m. EDT).


This isn’t the first film about the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Missionaries of Charity _ she was the subject of an acclaimed 1986 documentary, “Mother Teresa,” narrated, appropriately perhaps, by “Gandhi” director Richard Attenborough.

But “In the Name of God’s Poor” is the first full-length, big-budget movie about Mother Teresa that uses an actress _ in this case, Geraldine Chaplin _ in the unenviable position of trying to play a woman both tiny in stature yet larger than life.

Though the film is airing so soon after its subject’s death, it is not a rush job. Shepherded by Robert Halmi Sr. (“The Odyssey” miniseries), the film was completed before she died.

It is, however, unauthorized.

“I wish to make it clear that this movie is not authorized by Mother Teresa and does not carry her endorsement, nor that of the Missionaries of Charity,” Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa’s successor as head of the religious order, said at a press conference held in August in Calcutta.

Sister Nirmala said the film’s screenwriter, Dominique Lapierre, claimed the project was officially approved even though Mother Teresa twice had refused her.

That said, “In the Name of God’s Poor” certainly doesn’t play as though it is unauthorized _ certainly not in the sense of icon-bashing. The film is a prayer-card portrait _ reverential, glossy and full of pithy, inspirational sayings.

Mother Teresa, for example, calls the unfortunates she sees by the thousands “God’s distressing disguise.” After helping yet another poor soul, she says, “My mother always said, `If you do something good, do it without big fuss.”’ There are plenty more where those came from, and perhaps Mother Teresa felt this film itself was”big fuss.” Her life cannot comfortably be told in two hours, so the film telescopes the decade at the heart of her vocation, the struggle to establish her order of missionaries.


Opening in 1946 in Calcutta (actually it’s Sri Lanka, sent to wardrobe to look like India), the story introduces us to a 36-year-old cloistered nun who teaches geography at a convent school but knows little of the world outside the cloister’s walls, where the streets of the city are in turmoil.

India is on the brink of independence from Great Britain and there are riots for various reasons, including a lack of food. Boldly venturing out of the cloister to get food for her students, Mother Teresa is caught in the middle of a riot by an angry, starving mob. At that moment, she experiences an epiphany.

“I saw the starving children of God out there,” she tells a superior, “and I did nothing to help them.”

From there, the film progresses through Mother Teresa’s initial work in the slums of Calcutta, to the inevitable disapproval of her superiors, to her own begging for funds to found a hospital and school, to the few students who become her first followers, to great deeds and a Nobel Prize.

If this description seems matter-of-fact, it mirrors the pace and tone of the film, which suffers from a poverty of artfulness and imagination. And whoever thought the tall, patrician Geraldine Chaplin could pass for the elfish, maternal Mother Teresa was surely imagining things.

In all, “In the Name of God’s Poor” is a mediocrity, something Mother Teresa never was.


MJP END HEDGPETH

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