TV Reviews : ‘Getting Out’ Gets Into Mother, Daughter Struggle

“Getting Out” (as in getting out of prison) stretches the dramatic parameters of the network movie with a tough psychological portrait of a female ex-con and her relationship with a mother from hell.

Rebecca De Mornay, with a desperate and yearning country twang, plays a tough/vulnerable Georgia woman full of mistrust after emerging from eight years behind bars for theft and murder. Ellen Burstyn, framed by wire-rim glasses that give her face a cold, metallic impersonality, is the young woman’s chilling mom, denying her forgiveness for her old hooking days.

Director John Korty draws a complex and rich portrait from De Mornay, whose character is fighting to stay clean and gain custody of a son she gave birth to in jail. She’s pursuing honest work (washing dishes and teaching knitting) and even has kicked out her old lounge lizard of a pimp (the feral Robert Knepper).

*

This second “ABC Premiere Showcase” (which debuted last month with the much more accessible “Yarn Princess”) deserves credit for refreshingly tossing dramatic convention to the wind with this tale of moral squalor. It is based on Marsha Norman’s earliest play, “Getting Out,” which was inspired by her teaching work in Kentucky facilities. (The play was originally staged here at the Mark Taper in 1978, before Norman went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for “ ‘night, Mother”).

Although it’s to be expected that a movie has its own distinctions and will not mirror a theatrical experience, there is one crucial difference in this case. The teleplay by Eugene Corr and Ruth Shapiro shortchanges the complete arc of the play--that is, the parolee’s on-stage interior dialogues that dramatize the woman’s incorrigible youth and tell us how she got to be bad in the first place.

The movie only hints at the character’s childhood with a few flashbacks and emphasizes the woman’s life after jail, but not what got her there. Thus, the movie is less penetrating than the play but still compelling as TV.

* “Getting Out” airs at 9 tonight on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).