TV REVIEWS : Smart Startling as a Serial Killer

Jean Smart, in a radical acting departure, hurls herself into the sordid, reckless persona of the nation’s first convicted female serial killer in “Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story” (at 9 tonight on Channels 2, 8).

You won’t believe this is the same Smart from “Designing Women.” And if you happened to catch the real Aileen Wuornos on a jailhouse, TV talk-show interview last year, you know there’s not an actress in Hollywood who looks damaged enough to mirror the woman who picked up white male tricks and then scattered their bullet-riddled bodies along back roads in Florida.

But Smart, her bright, chic demeanor cast into a frowzy, glazed pallor and hauntingly twisted by pain and hatred, comes awfully close.

Her sociopathic character is a role multilayered with lurid bravado, despair and incalculable scars from physical and sexual childhood abuse (which are sparingly dramatized in flashbacks). Playing a hitchhiking prostitute who lured seven middle-aged men to their death before investigators realized the killer was a woman, Smart is both the savage and victim, terrifying and emotionally fragile, in what is her most startling work to date.

Early in the movie, a ranking detective, reflecting male sexism, scoffs at the suggestion the murderer might be female. “We’re looking for a man,” he snaps. “Women don’t kill strangers. They kill their husbands, lovers and their lovers’ mistresses.”

This story is every John’s worst-case scenario. Wuornos claimed in her trial (the movie stops at her arrest) that she killed in self-defense, that the louts got what was coming to them. And the murder sprees in Fred Mills’ teleplay, under Peter Levin’s direction, are depictions of killings selectively triggered by men who get rough, use and abuse her and refuse to pay her.

Lending a kind of “Thelma & Louise” dimension to the story is Wuornos’ only friend, her motel live-in lover Tyria Moore, played with edgy anxiety by Park Overall (“Empty Nest”). Brion James and Tim Grimm are solid as lawmen in stereotypical detective roles.