TV Reviews : ‘Too Young to Die?’ Dramatizes Teen Death Sentence

The murder in the oil fields in “Too Young to Die?” (at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is a wrenching catharsis, directed and acted with such veracity that it leaves you pale.

It is a tough but dramatically viable scene, not for any blood you see but for its emotional terror. You are that bound-up victim facing the crazed, knife-wielding 15-year-old girl and her scuzzy boyfriend. For a funny second, too, you are that girl with murder in her heart.

Everything in this excellent teleplay by David Hill and George Rubino (from a story by Hill, inspired by an actual crime in Oklahoma) moves toward and away from this central murder scene. The power of the show derives from the compelling script, from the taut framing of director Robert Markowitz, and from Juliette Lewis’ authentic portrayal of the young and abused murderess whose first question to her public defender (“L.A. Law’s” Michael Tucker) is whether he has any sugar-coated candies.

The production is hard as a cue ball--no distracting subplots, no wasted motion. It’s a story full of squalor and tacky trailer courts and cackling yahoos, dives, sex and drugs, and how all of these things determine the fate of this abandoned girl, even when she meets a genuine Prince Charming (Michael O’Keefe).

The film makers aren’t debating capital punishment but they are dramatizing a rigorous question: Should minors guilty of capital crimes be sentenced to death? The deck is not stacked too high in favor of the girl, either. That’s why that brutal murder scene (charged by the feral performance of the girl’s scumbag accomplice, played by Brad Pitt) is so agonizingly staged and so crucial to the theme.

A postscript pointedly reports that the Supreme Court last year decided to give states the right to put minors to death who are 16 or older and who have committed capital crimes. The last words on the screen tell us that 26 teen-agers are currently on Death Row in this country.