PASADENA, Calif. — I'm going to try to put this as nicely as I possibly can.

The "American Idol" winner plays herself in a new made-for-TV movie about her life ... and she's not convincing in the role.

The woman can't act. Apparently, she can't even behave naturally on camera, because she's not even being asked to act. She's just behaving by playing herself.

Unconvincingly.

It is by no means all Barrino's fault that "The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale" is, well, bad. If she were the most talented actress in Hollywood, she couldn't make this melodramatic, overwrought, clumsy movie into something good.

As a matter of fact, Barrino is smarter than the people who made the movie. She resisted the idea of playing herself when Lifetime bought the rights to her autobiography.

"I was like, 'Well, who is going to play me, and what is she going to look like? I want to meet her,'" Barrino said. "But when they came to me, they said, 'Well, they want you to play yourself.'

"I'm like, 'No. I don't act. I sing.' They said, 'Well, they feel like if you play yourself, it will come across."'

Just a bit of unsolicited advice for Barrino — in the future, go with your first instinct.

Barrino's story became familiar to all those tens of millions of "American Idol" fans during that show's third season. She was a 19-year-old unwed mother who couldn't read and had survived rape. There was some controversy over her being an "Idol" contestant, let alone the winner, because her story was indeed hardly the stuff of fairy tales.

"When you hear the word 'Idol,' people think that you have to be a certain way," Barrino said. "You have to be a perfect person. Your slate has to be clean. You have to be a role model in people's eyes. And when I went, I was the only one that had dropped out of school, that I had a child at a young age. I wasn't the perfect person that they thought that the idol should be."

It has all the makings of a compelling TV movie ... but it didn't turn out that way. Right from the start, when two identified people ask her if she wants to quit "American Idol" because the show has gotten some nasty e-mail about her, it's just badly written (in addition to the bad acting). And director Debbie Allen takes such a heavy-handed approach that reality seems utterly unbelievable.

And, more disappointing, it's uninvolving.

"The whole journey is what touched me, because Fantasia's story is a story that belongs to all of us — all of us who have been challenged," Allen said. "All of us who have been told, 'No, you can't,' but we ultimately find out, 'Yes, you can."'

What a beautiful thought that, somehow, resulted in an often laughably bad television movie.

And a little more unsolicited advice, this time for Lifetime and the movie's producers. The next time you look for someone to carry a telefilm, hire someone who can actually act.

---

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com