Ellen Gray: 'Grace' cashes in on true story of tragedy

AMISH GRACE. 8 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime Movie Network.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2006 schoolhouse massacre in Nickel Mines, Pa., that left five Amish schoolgirls dead and seriously injured five others, the world watched in wonder as the Amish expressed forgiveness for the shooter, who'd killed himself, and did what they could to comfort the family he'd left behind.

Not everyone understood then how they managed it and not everyone understands now.

But if you're looking for answers to mysteries of faith in "Amish Grace," the Lifetime Movie Network's exploitation of the tragedy - which it's made a point of scheduling for Palm Sunday - you'd be better off heading to the supermarket checkout to see if Brad and Angelina are together or apart this week.

After all, you could accidentally stumble over a fact or two there, since the celebrities whose lives some publications script like soap operas aren't technically fictional characters.

Which is more than you can say about the central figures in "Amish Grace," which warns at the very start that while it's "based on a true story . . . certain events and characters have been fictionalized, including the Graber family."

That would be Ida (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) and Gideon Graber (Matt Letscher) and their two daughters, one of whom is portrayed as being among the dead in the schoolhouse shooting.

Yes, they've fictionalized a dead child, placed her inside a real-life tragedy, and assigned her a mother and father who disagree about how to respond to her loss.

Not only does that provide just the sort of conflict that Hollywood loves (and the Amish seemingly try to avoid), but it also allows the scriptwriters to touch on that old favorite, shunning, which may be the one Amish practice we "English" appear able to grasp, perhaps because it involves merely cutting off problematic people, not electricity.

None of this should be mistaken for what religious scholars Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt and David L. Weaver-Zercher had in mind when they wrote "Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy" and elected to use pseudonyms for a number of the Amish they quoted. Those, they wrote, were individuals, not composites, and in assigning them typical Amish first names, they were respecting the wishes of people who've long avoided having their names in print.

They also used the real first names of the dead girls, whose identities were widely reported.

According to the Harrisburg Patriot-News, the book's publisher sold Lifetime the rights for the movie. "The authors have distanced themselves from the project," the paper reported, releasing a statement that they'd declined to cooperate with producers and planned to donate their proceeds to charity.

That left producers to fill in the blanks, creating not just stand-ins for some of the victims and their families but for the people who covered the shootings, now represented by a reporter (Fay Masterson) and cameraman (Philadelphia's Eugene Byrd) for a local TV station who befriend Ida Graber as she struggles to resist participating in the forgiveness of the man who murdered her daughter.

Ultimately, of course, they all learn A Valuable Lesson about forgiveness, one that may or may not have anything to do with what actually happened among the Amish.

But at least those who know the truth - the families themselves - can't be expected to watch. *

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