TV REVIEWS : Solid Acting Powers Potent ‘No One Would Listen’

Michelle Lee and James Farentino, in arguably the best performances of their careers in one of the year’s strongest TV movies, expose the horror of domestic violence in “When No One Would Listen” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

Until now, the most potent and highest-rated battered-wife movie was Farrah Fawcett’s 1984 “The Burning Bed.” The genre has been done to death in the intervening years, but this latest variation sets a milestone, particularly for Farentino, whose scowling, scalding mood swings almost make you flinch.

The subject matter is woefully familiar. What distinguishes this production is screenwriter Cindy Myers’ risky but effective dramatization of “talking heads,” in which the husband and wife (Gary and Jessica Cochran) distance you from the action with alternating dual monologues explaining their behavior. It works beautifully.

Director Armand Mastroianni constantly accelerates material that in essence is the stuff of an elevated potboiler. In fact, a literal boiling pot--in this case a hissing tea kettle--is used to immense advantage when the husband stalks his wife while she prepares breakfast under the thin security blanket of a useless restraining order.

Feeling chained to her husband “because of the forces of personal history, kids, money,” the wife’s entrapment becomes a deepening symbol of the inadequacy of the court system to protect women like her. At the same time, Lee (who served as executive producer) mirrors the stiff-upper-lip demeanor of a character who never descends--either in the writing or the playing--into bathos or false sentiment.

As for the temperamental, glowering Farentino, he too calibrates his performance so that’s it’s never overplayed.

The movie is alive with wrenching moments--among them the couple’s two children fitfully trying to watch television while Papa breaks up the house.