Despite Sweeps Hype, ‘Joan’ Marches to Miniseries Glory

If NBC’s “Noah’s Ark” made you swoon, “Joan of Arc” probably won’t. Not . . . one . . . joke.

On the other hand, this impressive and richly visual CBS two-parter lives up to most of its elaborate ratings-sweeps hype, for nothing beats a good old-fashioned castle siege met by hackings, spearings and hails of arrows, even if there is no budget for burning oil.

Filming beautifully in the castle-rich Czech Republic, director Christian Duguay packs the small screen with enough spectacle to satisfy any taste and enough combat pageantry to content any action zealot. And this script by Ronald Parker and Michael Miller, despite U-turning for occasional boneheaded visits with Joan’s lummoxy parents, captures the grand, irresistibly romantic melodrama of her story: A remarkable teenager, claiming guidance by divine voices, dies for her idealist dream of unifying France.

These are not easy tights to fill, however, and 16-year-old Leelee Sobieski achieves only mixed success as the 15th century French peasant girl who burns at the stake after leading a courageous rebellion against the English. Although the lanky Sobieski brings to Joan a cherubic freshness and panoramic eyes that are something to behold beneath her shag of hair, at times the role seems larger than she, and her voice a distant monotone in a thicket of chain mail and crossbows. Throughout much of Part 1, this minimalist Joan projects sincerity and conviction but rarely enough commanding presence to fit the legend of the Maid of Orleans and be the magnetic figure said to have inspired her countrymen to unite behind her against the powerful English.

The golden aura does finally appear, and when Sobieski is good, she’s very, very good, at once quietly seething and tenaciously spiny en route later to Joan’s 1431 date with the fiery stake near the end of the Anglo-French Hundred Years’ War. Sobieski is especially moving and convincing during the trial leading to the betrayed and chastened Joan’s death after she holds to her beliefs and, in effect, reneges on a plea bargain with her captors.

Serious, and schmaltz-resistant, “Joan of Arc” owes much of its success to supporting players. No one wears arrogance and a medieval costume better than Peter O’Toole, who does his best work in years as Joan’s ruthless but tormented inquisitor, Bishop Cauchon, to whom no divinity has ever spoken. His cynicism is clearly overmatched by her purity. Also, Neil Patrick Harris (“Doogie Howser, M.D.”) is exquisitely corrupt as that bored fop the Dauphin Charles, who coolly sells out Joan after she places him on the throne. And Sobieski is at her luminous best beside Shirley MacLaine’s fading Madame de Beaurevoir, who briefly becomes Joan’s protector.

Meanwhile, Duguay’s feel for the rhythms of gory conflict is evident in his battle sequences, most notably when Joan and her army, commanded by the mercenary La Hire (Peter Strauss), charge the fort guarding the city of Orleans “for God and France.”

The result is not only an unglamorous blood bath in which Joan is felled by an arrow but also surely the best, most persuasive action of its kind ever staged for television. The carnage is overwhelming, with Duguay, deploying his fluid camera in a sort of Kurosawa-lite, intensifying the sense of tragedy by giving viewers a helpless perspective on the hemorrhaging of life in the mud and chaos before them.

Further along, the heroine’s death in flames is somehow as poetic as it is sadly triumphant, becoming the last of many indelible pictures that “Joan of Arc” creates.

* “Joan of Arc” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PGV (may be unsuitable for young children with an advisory for violence).