TV Reviews : . . . And ‘Edge’ an Insult to Teen Treatment Centers

If they give you a choice between teen-age behavior treatment centers, kids, go to the movie one in “Lost Angels,” not the quasi prison camp run strictly for profit in “Out on the Edge,” the TV film airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.

“Lost Angels” is, overall, a pretty lurid movie, but it does give a sense of how some of these treatment centers work and it has, at least in its hospital sequences, some respect for its audience.

“Out on the Edge” is flat, simplistic and tidy, in spite of a very good Rick Schroder, following up his fine work in “Lonesome Dove” as 17-year-old Danny Evetts, who is caught in feelings of abandonment following his parents’ divorce. The tug of that situation is one of the most poignant that our disposable-marriage society has created: Kids who yearn to have their original family reunited, no matter how unrealistic the wish.

Writer Rene Balcer lays out a credible situation, a year in which this boy has seen all his familiar landmarks disappear. Gone are his steady girlfriend; his father (Richard Jenkins), already seriously involved with another woman; his sister (Kim Myers), now in college, and even his mother (Mary Kay Place). She has thrown herself into her new job selling real estate, and into an affair with a co-worker.

As Schroder’s difficulties escalate, his mother is pushed into considering this treatment facility, with its soothing television ads. Then the screenwriter, already in trouble trying to capture teen slang, goes into deep cliche and never comes out.

The movie’s Glenview Hospital is authoritarian, money-grubbing, pill-pushing. Its polar opposites are administrator Dakin Matthews, so intent on families’ insurance money that he has fabricated Schroder’s “suicidal” impulses, and Natalia Nogulich, a therapist new to Glenview.

A climax in silliness is reached as dirt-biker Danny braves a perilous hill that only his father has been able to ride before. Mom and Dad have had a third-act turn-around, not reunited but there for him, after viewing what is elaborately explained to us as “psychodrama.” And father even walks the precipitous plunge first, giving his son instructions on just how to ride it. Hey, Dad, chastened Dad, newly-understanding Dad: How about, “And Danny, wear your helmet!’ ‘