Unforgiven.

Our Fathers * Directed by Dan Curtis * Written by Thomas Michael Donnelly, based on the book by David France * Starring Christopher Plummer, Ted Danson, Brian Dennehy * Showtime, debuting May 21

It's an unlikely subject for a two-hour movie: out journalist David France's compelling 672-page masterpiece of reporting, covering the child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church across more than four decades. Nevertheless, Showtime's Our Fathers is a cut above the typical TV "issue" flick.

The core performances by Ted Danson, as the attorney who sues the church on behalf of dozens of abuse survivors, and Christopher Plummer, as Boston's besieged cardinal Bernard Law, ground the film in character rather than mere scandal. A mostly solid supporting cast brings to life many of the other players, including the meek and monstrous Father Geoghan (who abused more than 130 boys and girls) and the mercurial ex-activist gay priest Paul Shanley. Even a dramatized John Paul II has a cameo, underlining the pope's refusal to take seriously the crisis or its victims.

Plummer is especially effective as Law, who shielded abusive priests from prosecution as he shuffled them from parish to parish. Plummer's Law comes across as both insufferably arrogant and deeply human. It's a good choice dramatically but may be overly generous, offering a balance that no news footage of Law himself has ever revealed--even in recent weeks, as the deposed Law, now sheltered in a Vatican job, honored the late pope and appeared generally unscathed by disgrace.

The most fully realized performance comes from veteran actor Brain Dennehy, who plays Father Dominic George "Spags" Spagnolia, a self-effacing social reformer who rails against the church's inaction--until he is himself accused. Spags was the only priest to call a press conference to declare his innocence and his determination to fight the charge--a single accusation that was never flied legally and never corroborated. But the press conference, which included his affirmation that he had always been celibate, was his undoing. Spags's ex-boyfriend, from a brief period when he had left the priesthood, recognized him and called reporters. Guilty only of hiding his own adult gay relationship, Spags was forced out of the church he'd fought to rescue, never to return. Dennehy's natural charisma makes Spags the hero he indeed was, and his talent for intense internal turmoil (he won a Tony for Death of a Salesman, after all) makes Spags's fall from grace appropriately painful.

Our Fathers does have its movie-of-the-week moments. Many of the survivors are more thinly drawn than their abusers, and some patly written scenes necessary to move the story along clearly take more dramatic license with reality than you wish they would. And yes, the richness of France's reporting and historical analysis is by necessity left by the wayside. (So read the book, already.)

But director Dan Curtis (The Winds of War) is an old hand at shuffling multiple story lines. He's also an old hand at portraying charlatan preachers: Curtis got his big break as producer of the 1960s supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, which featured a series of evil clergymen aligned with witches and warlocks. Still, the real priests in Our Fathers--creeping into little boys' rooms to fondle them during bedtime prayers, offering teenagers ice cream in exchange for oral sex and absolution--are much scarier.