TV REVIEW : Baxter Scorching in ‘Scorned’

The story of Betty Broderick, the San Diego woman who shot her ex-husband and his new wife in their sleep, touched an uneasy nerve among those who followed the case. For anyone who’d been through a messy divorce, the emotions on both sides--if not the result--were easy to identify.

Now, only weeks after Broderick’s conviction and sentencing, the War of the Brodericks comes to television in “A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8).

With the news media pictures of Broderick so fresh, it is rather startling to see Meredith Baxter’s fierce and uncanny portrayal of this abandoned mother and betrayed homemaker. At least that’s how Broderick saw herself. In the TV movie, her wealthy lawyer-husband, Dan (Stephen Collins), and the audience see a shrieking, insecure woman who arguably drives her husband into the arms of another woman (Michelle Johnson as Linda Kolkena).

The besieged and crazed Broderick is a role actresses die for, and Baxter is both terrifying and vaguely empathetic as the rudderless woman with the lacerating tongue whose dirty mouth scalds her estranged husband’s telephone line. In scenes that make the movie “War of the Roses” look like a tame warm-up, she also sets fire to her husband’s clothes, violates one restraining order after another in eerie break-ins of his home and, in the production’s piece de resistance, smashes her car through the front door of his palatial new house.

The script by Joe Cacaci, based on a Los Angeles Times Magazine article by Amy Wallace, doesn’t whitewash the husband, but he’s not branded too severely either. His visible, emotional abuses--occasional family delinquency, arrogance, a wandering eye--are overwhelmed by Collins’ steady, affable characterization under director and co-producer Dick Lowry.

The story’s moral, one that hits a common pulse, is the pathetic mistake this ‘50s-conditioned woman made by projecting her whole existence into her husband’s life. Thus, when he leaves, her $16,000-a-month alimony means nothing. She’s not merely humiliated but emotionally bankrupt, turns into an avenging madwoman and loses everything, her kids and even her best friends. Dementia lurks not far behind.

From this perspective, the movie is a feminist’s nightmare but also a rueful morality play for all women.