`Witness to the Execution” is designed for controversy, turning on the premise of a publicly televised criminal execution set in the future and aired over an imaginary pay-per-view TV network.
And controversy is something “Witness” (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC-Ch. 5) has already won, including denouncement by one religious crusader and even criticism by one U.S. senator.
To be fair, though, for all the morbid sensationalism of its subject, and despite a number of dramatic lapses, this television movie toils earnestly to examine the hot-button issue of violence on television, not to glory in it.
What violence is portrayed is oblique, elliptical and condemned with virtuous outrage by the moviemakers. And even the movie’s bloodthirsty climactic moment, in which a multiple murderer is electrocuted in the middle of a giant sports dome, isn’t particularly graphic, handled with more subtlety and indirect photography than the depiction of Susan Hayward’s gruesome gas chamber execution in the 1958 film “I Want to Live!”-an occasional television offering for decades now.
No, despite its flaws, “Witness” brings up an inevitable and timely issue in the public’s ongoing appetite for reality television and simultaneous aversion to it. One may condemn the idea of televised executions, but executions are, by definition, always partially public, the movie argues. Invited guests are as traditional as the prisoner’s last, indulgent meal.
Censoring executions, however common-sensical, goes against their mission as looming deterrents and at the same time is squeamish in an era when newscasts feature sights of dead bodies and victims undergoing brutal beatings. Why stop with repeated telecasts of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, or sights of maimed and dismembered Bosnian corpses?
In the fictional narrative of the movie, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, from a script by Thomas Baum, that current outer limit is questioned to the max. Tycom Communications, the pay-per-view conglomerate desperate for a hit, is led by folks much like the ruthless moguls of the theatrical movie “Network,” steeled to feverishly rationalize and defend their decision to telecast programmed death.
The execs are giving part of the money to the state to help fight crime, which is how they win government approval; another portion will go to the killer’s surviving daughter, the offspring of a rape.
The fictional executives themselves, in their ping-pong debate, bring up some genuine issues. Will a televised execution, in fact, fail to deter crime and instead inspire others to commit it? Will it create a whole new rash of would-be sacrificial Christ figures, a part that the fictional killer (Tim Daly) seems bent on assuming as part of his historic role? Will others, in other words, go out and kill simply for the glory of televised execution?
The movie’s fine cast is led by film actress Sean Young. Her presence, always sexy and intelligent, lends authority and resolve that bolsters the story’s credence, even if she can’t, by herself, fix all the problems in the script.
As the Tycom executive who first thinks up this idea, Young is a more convincing and monstrous version of Faye Dunaway’s similarly power-driven she-tornado in “Network,” a character which Young’s role consistently resembles.
The trouble with “Witness” is that the initial issue gets bogged down in a mundane mystery, a poorly plotted whodunit that questions whether killer Daly really committed the murders of which he’s accused.
That triggers second thoughts on Young’s part, leading to moral revelations too easy and automatic in their arrival. Young’s conversion is convincing in her performance, but not in the details outlined in the script itself. She comes around too quickly, shedding what’s supposed to be years of career-building for an instant moral rehabilitation, and her plea for human feeling comes off as sentimentality, swallowing up the chilling seriousness her character originally represents.
“Witness,” though, is slickly appointed, with fashions and decor that are funny, funky exaggerations of contemporary styles, a tactic in the best tradition of futuristic settings. There are amusing time-travel jokes as well: allusions to a recent coup in Cuba, for instance, and an upcoming pay-per-view benefit concert to star this lineup: Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Diamond.
“What’s the concert’s cause?” sneers the Tycom exec when offered the show as a pay-per-view special. “Save Social Security?”
– Gee, life’s tough today, especially if you’ve spent the last 16 years in a cloistered convent.
So goes the plot, theme and depth level of “Body and Soul,” the latest Masterpiece Theatre series beginning at 8 p.m. Sunday, PBS-Ch. 11.
Based on Marcelle Bernstein’s novel, “Body and Soul” is inexcusably sudsy in tracing the experiences of a British nun forced to venture from her convent to deal with her family’s crises. After her brother kills himself, she’s the only relative left to help her widowed, pregnant sister-in-law grapple with the survival of the family’s sinking textile mill.
A kind of spiritual sequel, in a way, to Fred Zinnemann’s superb film classic, “The Nun’s Story,” Sister Gabriel, or Anna (Kristin Scott Thomas), is first glimpsed bound by the strictures of convent life that gave such trouble to Audrey Hepburn in the movie: The imposed silences, the rule against any physical touching, and the banishment of friendship, which one of the younger novices breaks in an unhealthy obsession for the story’s heroine.
But unlike the outstanding film, this TV series often goes for the cheap shot. Sister Gabriel’s re-emergence is largely one of a prolonged, torrid seduction. She manages to extricate herself twice from two panting, would-be slips of the flesh before finally caving in. Filmed with the tasteful restraint characteristic of British TV, “Body and Soul” nevertheless has, at its heart, the breathless heat of a romance novel.
Meanwhile, an assistant mill manager (Anthony Valentine) is working underhandedly to secretly propel the business’ ruin and then buy the factory cut-rate. Despite this formidable villain, and her years behind convent walls, Sister Gabriel proves an invaluable career woman who dances around corporate naysayers and miraculously saves the day. Throughout, she keeps returning to the convent, where she makes the other nuns uncomfortable and where she’s photographed in long, dreary sessions of angst and soul-searching.
Whatever genuine point “Body and Soul” intends is lost in its drawn-out superficiality. Anna seems a modern woman imprisoned by mistake in a convent, only needing a little taste of the glorious outside world to bring her forth and accept real life. Both contemporary career women and contemplative nuns, it seems, are shortchanged by this analysis.
