'Warm Springs' Illuminates The Hard-Won Victory of FDR

David Paymer is important to the film as Louie Howe, the right-hand man who never stops believing in FDR and clearly loves him like a brother. There are great set pieces, like FDR elatedly conquering a hand-controlled car (the old cars in the film, minor detail though it may be, are beautiful, and so is the train). And though sentiment is used sparingly, there's a splendidly moving scene in which Roosevelt bids farewell to the wheelchair community at Warm Springs. Your eyes are unlikely to be any drier than the springs are.

But the movie's tone is, finally, not sentimental but candid and unflinching -- one chapter, and a decisive one, from an immensely poignant profile in courage.

'Riding the Bus With My Sister'

Dustin Hoffman may have gotten on your nerves in "Rain Man," but imagine if he had shouted or shrieked all his dialogue instead of mumbling it -- and if he weren't so accomplished an actor. Rosie O'Donnell plays a Rain-Mannish role in "Riding the Bus With My Sister," CBS's Sunday movie (tomorrow night at 9 on Channel 9), and rare is the moment when you don't want to bean her -- or at least somehow chase her away.

O'Donnell, who also executive-produced the film (often a bad sign), plays Beth, who is brash and sloppy and mentally disabled. She can function on a day-to-day level, at least if she confines herself to her routine of traveling around town by transferring from bus to bus, then going home at night as if after a long day's work. Of course, shouting is work, kind of, especially when one does it incessantly.

Meanwhile, across the country, Beth's sister Rachel, who basically corresponds to the Tom Cruise character in "Rain Man," is Beth's opposite, a successful commercial photographer whose memories of childhood with Beth are not particularly pleasant -- and they pop up every few minutes in flashbacks. The two little girls in the flashbacks are very cute indeed.

Rachel, played by Andie MacDowell, goes to visit Beth and learns that life isn't all business and checkbooks and grouchy, gorgeous fashion models. Told (coldly) that she is "cold" by her boyfriend, Rachel warms up, slowly, to Beth, whom everybody seems to adore, and eventually they become good friends and real sisters. We're giving nothing away by telling you all this because anybody with any movie-watching experience will see the plot's turns, denouement and "message" coming from a great, great distance.

Maybe someday someone will dare to make a movie about a mentally unbalanced person who is nothing but a pain in the neck and has nothing to teach anyone. We don't mean to be cold ourselves, or cynical and mean, but the situation and relationships in this film have been mined so many times in movie after movie that you'd think writer Joyce Eliason (adapting a book by Rachel Simon) and director Anjelica Huston would have said to each other somewhere along the line, "Wait a minute -- why don't we try something new?"

Beth depends on the kindness of strangers, who obligingly become friends and don't seem to mind that she yells at them, and everybody else, virtually all the time. An especially accommodating bus driver tells Rachel how he came to be fond of Beth: "I started looking forward to that big smile," he says. What big smile? O'Donnell plays Beth wearing what look like upside-down dentures and a nearly perpetual crabby frown. She seldom smiles and has few ingratiating moments. But according to movie mythology, a character like Beth has mystical access to magical insights that only people in her condition get to experience.

Okay, fine, but it's not made clear what these fantastic hidden truths might be -- the ones the rest of us miss because we don't stop and smell the roses and all that. It's a nice cliche, but it fails to take into account realities such as big sharp thorns and rose fever. Good grief, there could be a bee hiding in one of those roses just waiting to sting you on the nose and make it swell up like a soccer ball. Sometimes it is highly advisable to leave the damn roses alone and keep walking.

MacDowell is, as virtually always, a sweetly ingratiating presence, but gifted with acting talent though she is, even she can't make Rachel's sudden transformation from Beth-basher to Beth-booster believable. When the two sisters finally part, as indeed we know they must, we're supposed to share in Rachel's sorrow and sense of enlightenment. But it's really just as easy to imagine that she's thinking, "Well, I'm glad that's over. Now I can get back to New York, where everybody's crazy so it isn't noticed as much."