CBS' two-night "Million Dollar Babies" seems tailor-made for Newt Gingrich.
The next speaker of the House looked at "Forrest Gump" and the Susan Smith case and saw reasons to vote Republican. Imagine then what he could do with this story:
A hard-working father and stay-at-home mother seem the object of a miracle when the mother gives birth to quintuplets. The family and its plain-spoken doctor at first become darlings of the media, but cynical reporters and a selfish government attack the family. When the father tries to make a few dollars from the situation (if only to avoid taking government charity), the government takes the quints and puts them in a government-run facility that turns the children into a sideshow attraction.
The doctor quickly is corrupted by the fame and fortune accompanying his tiny charges, and in the long run the family is ruined. Only the government, which returns the children to their parents after squeezing vast profits from them, emerges as a winner.
Family values, bad guys in the press, government-run health care -- plus there's a Democrat in the White House. Gingrich should have a field day, except for two little things. The Democratic president was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the story takes place in 1930s Canada. But that probably won't stop Republicans from metaphor hunting.
And the rest of us still can enjoy a grimly fascinating drama based on one of the great sensations of the '30s.
Quintuplets Cecile, Yvonne, Annette, Emilie and Marie were born in 1934 to Oliva and Elzire Dionne, a French-Canadian couple. Two sets of triplets played the children -- including Samantha, Emily and Brooke Gilliland, from Snow Hill, Md.
The five Dionne girls together did not weigh a dozen pounds, and their chances of survival were poor. But thanks in part to a tough old doctor named Allan Roy Dafoe, they survived. And when the U.S. press heard about them, and told about them, suddenly the world was at their door.
"Million Dollar Babies," which airs Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m., is a chronicle of a miracle turned disaster. At the center is Dafoe, played by Beau Bridges, whose worries about the babies evolve into the maintenance of an empire built on them.
At the same time, as Suzette Couture's screenplay tells it, the children become the center of a political struggle between the United States, whose reporters saw the story in the Dionnes before the Canadian press did, and Canada, whose government is at risk when it appears to be neglecting the children.
But the blame for neglect is quickly shifted to the girls' father. When he agrees to exhibit the babies in the United States, the Canadian government takes custody away from the Dionnes, making the children wards of the state under the guardianship of Dafoe.
A long struggle among the Dionnes, Dafoe and the government followed -- longer even than the movie shows. The girls, not quite 6 when their parents regain custody in the movie, were in fact 9 when it happened.
"They are totally estranged from their other brothers and sisters -- there were six other children -- and virtually estranged from their father and mother," "Million Dollar Babies" executive producer Bernard Zukerman told reporters last summer. "It was a tragedy. This family was torn apart."
The irony, as "Million Dollar Babies" indicates, is as Bridges has said: "The mistakes that were made, I don't think were mean-spirited. Many times people were doing things that they thought would help the girls."
In fact, the girls become an excuse for many awful acts, including the one that gives the movie a far from happy ending.
In real life, Annette, Cecile and Yvonne are still alive. Emilie died in 1954 and Marie died in 1970. Both parents are dead.