TV REVIEWS : 1 Extra Confession in ‘2 Faces of Evil’

As true-life TV movies go, “Confessions: Two Faces of Evil” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) hits unusually close to home.

On Christmas Eve, 1980, on a bleak street in San Fernando, police officer Dennis Webb was cut down by six bullets when he emerged from his black and white to question a robbery suspect, who fled in the cop’s car.

In San Fernando, they still remember Webb and the killing’s maddening aftermath, when two young men fitting the suspect’s description confessed to the slaying, which only one of them could have committed. The production rides this conundrum if not with style at least with fidelity to the larger facts, as faded L.A. headlines come back to life.

Actors Jason Bateman and James Wilder etch some quirky flavor as the two suspects--the smirky, New Mexico college honors student and Sylmar High grad William Mothershed and boisterous drifter Robert Berndt.

Those who remember the highly publicized outcome of the case won’t have as much fun negotiating the psychological puzzle. Why are both young men, who don’t know one another, confessing to the same murder? Who is lying? Which one did it?

Contributing strong support are James Earl Jones as a flamboyantly bemused defense lawyer steeped in courtroom gamesmanship, Melinda Dillon as one suspect’s open-faced, dimheaded mom and Ari Meyers, refreshingly offbeat as a suspect’s girlfriend with a private agenda. TV veteran Gil Cates directed in workmanlike fashion from a script by Gy Waldron.