TV REVIEW : Woodward Potent in ‘Blind Spot’

“Hallmark Hall of Fame,” which normally eschews dramas about messy, topical urban problems for such shows as “Sarah, Plain and Tall” and “O Pioneers!,” has suddenly been bit with a case of social advocacy.

“Blind Spot” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, Channels 2 and 8) attempts to say something about the abuse of drugs and particularly drug-afflicted babies. Happily, though, the production finds its true Hallmark card before it’s too late: The real subject and culprit of the movie is not drugs at all but an overbearing control freak of a mom (Joanne Woodward, in a withering performance).

Playing a hard-charging Washington congresswoman who is mounting a campaign for the U.S. Senate, Woodward’s character starts off resembling a cross between Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--right down to her environmentalist speeches and eager young staffers.

By story’s end, however, she suggests a haunted character in a Eugene O’Neill play.

That’s because this successful wife, mother and liberal politician undergoes a personal crucible of fire that purges her of her many illusions. First, to her dismay, her beloved son-in-law and top administrative aide (Reed Diamond) is killed in a car accident while under the influence of drugs. Next, her self-contained world is shattered by the discovery that her pregnant daughter (Laura Linney) is a cocaine addict, turning her granddaughter’s future into a big question mark.

As a woman who’s used to controlling and subsequently driving away those around her (including her gentle, poetry-reading husband, played with tweedy elegance by Fritz Weaver), Woodward’s character is a pushy, unsympathetic portrait of a woman forced into brutal self-awareness.

In this context, scenarist Nina Shengold, director Michael Toshiyuki Uno and co-producer Woodward (who initiated the project) achieve what good drama has done since the ancient Greeks, i.e., stripping away the hero’s “blind spot” so that life is never the same for him/her again.