CBS describes its latest miniseries as a "true crime love story." As opposed, of course, to a "true love crime story." True crime stories, with or without love, were for years the most popular kind of miniseries drama, wallowing in violence and explicit gore.
The violence in "Guilty Hearts" is restrained, and the story is not so much sordid as it is sad -- in fact, heartbreakingly sad, thanks to the central performance of Marcia Gay Harden as a small-town church organist drawn into a sinister doctor's scheme to kill his wife.
In Part 1, things move very slowly and yet fairly surely as the story unfolds. Jenny Moran (Harden) plays the organ at a trendy church attended by Dr. Stephen Carrow (Treat Williams), a highly respected physician whom the church elders vote their man of the year. Jenny doesn't really know the doctor -- the differences in their social and economic status make them unlikely pals -- but she approaches him at church one Sunday morning to ask about her stubborn father's intractable pains. Carrow tells her to bring Dad around to the office. When she does, poor Papa crumples to the floor. He has pancreatic cancer and only a short time to live.
What Jenny and the doctor also have in common are troubled marriages. Jenny is suffering some sort of emotional crisis in her 15th year with her dumpy husband, Matt (Gary Basaraba), who refuses to attend the church where she's the organist and instead accompanies their kids on Sunday morning outings. At home, Jenny feels taken for granted and neglected.
As for the doctor, he's far too much in love with himself to make room for another person, especially a wife (Jennifer Dale) who threatens to take him to the proverbial cleaners should their marriage end in divorce. Dr. Carrow and Jenny Moran keep bumping into each other when, finally, about an hour into the four-hour drama, they share a huge smooch at an art gallery.
From there it's a hop, a skip and a jump into the sack, and the affair has begun. What the screenplay by J.B. White and Steven Siegel never makes clear is whether the doc really has fallen for Jenny or is just using her as a sex toy and an important building block in an elaborate scheme to murder his wife.
Up to the point where Mrs. Carrow is killed, the story seems linear and straightforward. Viewers may wonder why a movie was made about such a relatively mundane murder case (no disrespect to the victim intended). But there are perplexing and intriguing twists along the way, and Jenny goes through an unexpected ordeal that seems cruel and unusual punishment for her little bout of adultery.
As directed by Marcus Cole, the film has a real feel for American small-town life -- even though, like more and more TV movies, it was shot mostly in Canada. The church at which Jenny is the hired organist is a glitzy, high-tech establishment outfitted with the latest video equipment. Some church members and officials, even the pastor, reveal themselves to be hypocrites and saps, easily duped by the doctor even after he's jailed for murder.
The performances of Harden and Williams make up for shortcomings in the script. Williams uses his aging pretty-boy kisser to insidious and intimidating effect. Harden doesn't just suffer nobly through her tribulations; she makes you feel what she's feeling and deftly communicates complex frustrations that are hard to articulate in mere words.
Olympia Dukakis, however, is a bit of a chore as Jenny's mother; she goes from woe to woe in the same doleful mope, dragging her sad old face around the house. The story could have been told in one three-hour lump -- but that would have allowed for fewer revenue-producing commercial minutes for CBS.
It's certainly not arty, but it isn't grisly exploitation -- the way those "true crime" movies used to be -- either. "Guilty Hearts" is awfully grim but terribly gripping.
Deadly sins: Marcia Gay Harden and Treat Williams as adulterous lovers.Marcia Gay Harden, left, as a church organist drawn into her married lover's murder plot, and Olympia Dukakis as her mother in "Guilty Hearts."
