Standout Performances Lift ‘Unforgivable’

Spousal abuse is hardly new ground for TV movies, but tonight’s CBS film, “Unforgivable,” based on a true story, does offer a controversial twist: the idea that, with therapy, a batterer will batter no more and can return to his family.

Otherwise, although disturbing, there’s nothing new in these harrowing scenes of domestic violence and a wife and children picking up the pieces. It’s the standout performances of the two leads, John Ritter and Harley Jane Kozak, that make this more than a bathetic wallow--especially Ritter as Paul Hegstrom, the batterer du jour.

Ritter is remarkably convincing in his shifts between puffy petulance and calculated rage, as he beats his wife, hurts his daughter (Gina Phillips) and nearly kills his girlfriend (Susan Gibney).

Kozak is equally believable as the suffering, demoralized wife who finds her strength and a new life when the beating stops.

Ritter does such a good job as the sociopathic abuser, in fact, that you keep waiting for a crack in his kinder and gentler persona as he moves from angry denial in his group therapy with other batterers toward self-realization and control.

Particularly since the film takes viewers only to the point where he has regained his ex-wife’s trust enough to be invited in for a cup of hot chocolate.

Written by A.R. Simoun and Dan Levine and directed with a feeling for domestic Gothic by Graeme Campbell, the film may not convince viewers that therapy can mean a happily-ever-after ending for batterers and their victims, but it does end with a crawl stating that the real Paul and Judy Hegstrom remarried and, during the next 11 years, founded scores of programs designed to treat male batterers, here and in Europe.

* “Unforgivable” airs at 9 tonight on CBS (Channel 2).