DOING WELL AT DOING GOOD

By RICHARD CORLISS

Imagine your four-year-old boy--healthy, cheerful, with a bright future you take for granted--suddenly swept into an epileptic seizure. He goes stiff; his eyes roll up; his jaw is clenched. Except for his piglet squeals, he might have been dead for a minute or two. Children during grand mal attacks seem possessed; in the New Testament, epilepsy is referred to as a "demon." So the mother of an epileptic boy first looks at doctors as exorcists. But as she sees them prescribe a series of harsh medications, each creating side effects that the next is supposed to treat, she wonders if they aren't sadists--and if they know of a potential cure that they smugly refuse to recommend.

...first do no harm" (Feb. 16, 9 p.m. ET, ABC) has the requisites of a made-for-TV noble weepie: a disease, an innocent victim and an ordinary mom who becomes a wily fighter for her child's life. The film also has Meryl Streep, the most honored actress of her generation, in her first TV movie in 20 years. In the recent Marvin's Room, Streep played the selfish mother of a troubled child. But ...first do no harm" is better--less because of its heroine than because of its collective villain: the doctors to whom we entrust our lives.

When Robbie Reimuller (Seth Adkins) is diagnosed as having epilepsy, his parents Lori (Streep) and Dave (Fred Ward) go along with the specialists' recommendations. But Dr. Abbasac (Allison Janney), a real Cruella DePill type, makes Robbie a tiny living lab for dubious experiments. Ann Beckett's bold teleplay charges doctors with being addicted to prescribing dangerous drugs to kids. The medical ordeal also acts as a mind-altering drug on Dave and Lori; it twists their love into rage and recrimination.

Because Dave, a truck driver, has just switched jobs, the Reimullers have no medical coverage. And here the movie touches on the real dramas that most big-screen films can't be bothered with: questions of aching financial need, the humiliations of the newly poor, the sight of kids crying while the parents argue over huge hospital bills.

Every problem movie is really a solution movie; it must offer a cure at the end of the agony; parents may surrender to copelessness but never to hopelessness. So Lori hears of the Ketogenic Diet, a regimen that has quelled seizures in perhaps a third of the epileptic children who've tried it. Among the controversial diet's true believers are the film's director, Jim Abrahams (of the team that created the Airplane! and Naked Gun farces), and his son Charlie, 4, whose seizures ceased after he went on the diet and who plays a cameo role here.

You must bring to ...first do no harm" a tolerance for lines like Lori's anguished "Please don't let him die!" But most of the piece has a steely passion that is evident in Ward's frazzled manliness and, especially, in Streep's carefully natural performance. She has the small gestures and tight, hectoring voice of a woman untrained for heroism, and, finally, the exhaustion of a longtime caregiver. It's been said of Streep that she learns each new role as if it were a foreign language. Here, though, she's acting, not Acting--inhabiting the part rather than overwhelming it. She has reduced her mannerisms and raised her game to play a good, strong woman in a good, strong movie.

--By Richard Corliss