TV Reviews : Dark Secrets of Childhood on CBS’ ‘Silence’

Oedipal complexes are not normally the stuff of television movies, but the subject is observed with ever-tightening focus in CBS’ “Breaking the Silence” (at 9 tonight on Channels 2 and 8).

The story is superficially the drama of a teen-age boy who has murdered his violently abusive father and goes to court pleading self defense. But, at its core, the drama is a peeling away of dark childhood Oedipal secrets that are destroying both the youth on trial (Chris Young) and his own defense attorney (Gregory Harrison).

Harrison is a sophisticated, high-priced lawyer whose life seems perfect except for this habit he has of picking up prostitutes, not for sex but for aggressive purposes tied to his twisted childhood relationship with his mother. When a former girlfriend from law school (Stephanie Zimbalist) asks him for a favor to help her defend a troubled adolescent, he agrees grudgingly and his worst fears are realized.

As Harrison compels the horrible bedtime-childhood truth out of the youthful defendant, the attorney is forced to a shameful recognition of his own suppressed childhood trauma with his mother. Some of this purgation is grueling but the effect is never schematic. The dual view of destructive mothers is measured rather than exploited.

The psychological damage in the attorney’s case is deftly recreated through gauzy, slow-motion flashbacks, and director Robert Iscove and writer Adam Greenman eschew a cliche ending for a realistic one tinged with a little light.