
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 17, 1994                   TAG: 9411210014
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

`MILLION DOLLAR BABIES' IS A SAD STORY WELL TOLD

No one thought they could survive. Their mother was given the last rites shortly after they were born. The mother lived, however, and so did her children, and the Dionne Quintuplets went on to make history - though for the most part, not the kind of history anybody would want to make.

It's an astonishing story and one very compellingly told in ``Million Dollar Babies,'' an exceptional and daringly depressing two-part film CBS is airing on Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. (on WDBJ-Channel 7). The movie, a co-production of CBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., will air those same nights in Canada.

``Nobody cares what happens in Canada,'' one American character scoffs early in the film, not knowing what a big event had just occurred in northern Ontario: how Elzire Dionne, who already had five children with her husband Oliva, gave birth to five more on the same night, May 28, 1934. Midwives delivered some until a local doctor arrived to take over, predicting it would be ``a miracle'' if the babies, two months premature, lived.

Miracles happen, and the five Dionne girls became the first quintuplets to survive en masse, but the miracle went horribly awry. The Canadian government, alarmed by the father's plans to exhibit the children at the Chicago World's Fair, stepped in, declared the parents unfit and assumed guardianship. All five girls were moved to a specially built hospital across the street from the shabby Dionne farm and, for a time, their mother was forbidden even from holding them in her arms.

The ``temporary'' arrangement went on for years. A small theme park grew up around the hospital and the quints were put on display like monkeys in a cage. Though the parents were granted access to visit them, excuses were often concocted to keep them away. ``Million Dollar Babies'' is, among other things, a tale of bureaucrats run amok, a cautionary fable from real life about the evils of government interference in private lives.

CBS insisted on at least one American star for the film, so Beau Bridges was cast as Allan Roy Dafoe, the doctor who delivers the babies and then gets himself appointed their guardian. Before long he is holding them up for amazed onlookers and saying things like, ``This is my Marie.''

Dafoe, a crotchety widower, repeatedly describes himself to others as ``a simple country doctor,'' but the limelight causes him to go bananas. He becomes an unlikely superstar, the subject of a movie, a darling of the press who found crowds laughed appreciatively whenever he answered questions with a folksy, ``Sure. Why not?'' By this account, he went from being a disagreeable local character to a full-fledged media monster.

Even as powerful a story as this could easily be bungled in the telling. But the writer, Suzette Couture, and director, Christian Duguay, maintain a brilliant balance between emotionalism and intelligence. The film is easily as well made as many of the imported British dramas seen on public TV. In fact, it is so serious and grim that some viewers will be put off by it. But if it is uncommonly demanding, it is also uncommonly rewarding.

Though Bridges is too young for the part of the doctor, he does a fine and wily job. Celine Bonnier and Roy Dupuis, both unfamiliar to U.S. audiences, are outstanding as the parents, though one wishes Dupuis had learned to project a little better; some of his lines are all but impossible to hear. The movie is stolen, though, by Kate Nelligan as an invented character, a composite designed to personify the prying press: Helena Reid, a radio sob-sister who keeps listeners spellbound with maudlin tales of real life.

The film's producers tried to find real quints to play the Dionne children at ages 5 and 7 but could only come up with triplets and twins. This works fine. As newborns, the quints are played by puppets - animatronic dolls that wriggle and squirm and yawn. The quints weighed only about two pounds each when born, so casting real babies in the roles was unthinkable.

Even though the Dionnes eventually get their children back, the story still does not have a happy ending. Life can be like that. TV movies rarely are. But ``Million Dollar Babies'' is a movingly and hauntingly special case.

Washington Post Writers Group

by CNB