'ROMAN SPRING' TAKES QUITE A FALL.

Byline: David Kronke Television Critic

'THE ROMAN SPRING of Mrs. Stone'' is ``The Lizzie McGuire Movie,'' a kid flick opening this weekend, only retooled for menopausal women. In both, our protagonists venture to Rome and experience some ill-fated romance with a young Italian stud named Paolo. The main difference is ``Roman Spring'' is based on a novel by Tennessee Williams, while ``Lizzie'' is based on a so-so sitcom; curiously, the end result in both cases is curiously unsatisfying.

Here, Karen Stone (Helen Mirren) is a fading Broadway actress who flees America after her husband (Brian Dennehy in a tiny, pointless and not terribly well-observed role) miscasts her in a disastrous production of ``Romeo and Juliet.'' He soon dies (See? Told you it was a tiny part), leaving her, as she notes more than once, ``adrift'' in post-war Italy; a flamboyant countess (Anne Bancroft) sets Karen up on a series of dates with available young men who all seem to have acquaintances in dire need of large sums of money.

Nonetheless, she strikes up a passionate affair with one of them (Olivier Martinez), with whom she has exchanges like this:

Karen: ``Paolo, are you a fascist?''

Paolo: ``I am an aristocrat.''

Karen: ``Is that an answer?''

Meanwhile, a homeless guy (Rodrigo Santoro) - mind you, a homeless guy with the drop-dead good looks, three-day stubble and insouciantly tousled hair of a male model - obsessively tails her around the city. This movie seems determined to single-handedly make up for all the creepy movies in which Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford cavort with women 30 years younger than they.

Director Robert Allan Ackerman wallows in the languorous atmosphere of bored jet-setters, but outside of Mirren, whose performance under the circumstances can only be described as heroic, he allows his performers to play their roles in far too grandiose a manner. Bancroft's hands dart about like drunken hummingbirds as she delivers lines like, ``Youth is a cruel gift, like snow in April: breathtaking, and then - ahhh! - the sun.'' And Roger Allam, as Williams' stand-in, an ostensibly droll Southern playwright who seems to think he's a master thespian straining to reach the cheap seats when he uncorks drivel such as, ``Baby, this party is crawling with stately witches and dandies, who, despite their elegance, are really just hookers or pimps.''

You may have noticed there's a lot of bright-purple writing in this production as well.

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE - Two stars

What: A widow abroad seeks passion in the arms of a younger man.

Where: Showtime.

When: 8 tonight; also May 12, 14 and 28.

In a nutshell: Helen Mirren's truly heroic performance, in the midst of a lot of overacting, is the only reason to check this out.