Patty Duke has never been better than in her breakthrough role in The Miracle Worker. Truth is, she hasn’t been very good at all in most of her performances since. But she’s at her best again as a woman who is challenged to make a miracle happen in the NBC miniseries A Matter of Justice.
Duke plays Mary Brown, the mother of an 18-year-old Marine who is brutally murdered at the base apartment he shared with his wife and daugher. The military police quickly arrest and successfully prosecute another serviceman for the crime but Mary is not appeased. Convinced that her daughter-in-law Dusty, who Mary despises, was a party to the homicide, Mary wages a relentless crusade to have Dusty arrested and tried.
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“Mrs. Brown,” Mary is told by a prosecutor, “you got the man who killed your son. You’ll never get the woman. Let it rest.”
This is totally unacceptable to Mary. “If it were your child,” she responds, “would you let it rest?” As daunting a task as it is to motivate the government to reopen a case it considers closed, it is the easier of two mountains Mary chooses to climb.
Simultaneous to her pursuit of justice for Dusty, Mary engages in a down-and-dirty battle for custody of her granddaughter Christine. This is the dispute that will require a miracle for her to win, Mary’s lawyer warns her. Grandparents have little standing in court against a child’s natural mother.
Alexandra Powers, who recently joined L.A. Law as an attorney with strong moral convictions, is the antithesis of such a person as Dusty, an aggressive tart who seduces the younger Chris Brown at a military town honky-tonk.
You’ve heard the expression “poor white trash.”Dusty is poor white toxic waste.
But to the vastly less experienced Chris, she’s a dream lover. Even before he has a chance to bring her home to meet the folks, she gets him to marry her and she becomes pregnant.
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It’s dislike at first sight for mother and daughter-in-law and Dusty uses Mary’s hostility toward her as the justification to alienate Chris from his family.
It isn’t long before the flirtatious Dusty begins to despise Chris the way Mary despises her. A distraught Chris returns home for comfort and counsel. His father, played by Martin Sheen, advises him to go back and give it another try.
It’s too late, however. Dusty has already staked out a new Marine, who looks like Cro-Magnum Man but isn’t that bright.
“I wish you were dead,” Dusty tells Chris. At the time, she was speaking metaphorically. However, when a friend informs Dusty that the only way she will retain Chris’s benefits is if she is his widow, her dismissal of him takes on a literal connotation.
The next time the Browns hear of their son is a phone call to inform them he has been stabbed to death. This is when Mary launches her wars on two fronts.
Except for the fact that this is a true story and an innocent child is involved, the underhanded shenanigans pulled by Mary and Dusty to gain control of Christine would be almost comical.
At one point, Mary finds to her chagrin that the pursuit of ceramic elephants, which might have been transported illegally across state lines, has a higher priority to the FBI than a kidnapped little girl.
Mary’s cause will be sympathetic to fair-minded viewers, especially parents and grandparents, but the way Duke plays her, Mary is not always a sympathetic character. She is domineering and overbearing toward outsiders and cold toward her family. In fact, her personality contributed to Chris’s decision to join the armed forces.
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Sheen is practically somnambulate as Jack Brown, playing Chris’s father as if the mere raising of his voice will bring on a heart attack. As it turns out, this is the perfect interpretation of the character.
Jason London, as Chris, is out of the picture too rapidly to leave much of an impression.
On the other hand, Charles Dutton best known as Fox’s Roc, also has a limited role as an investigator but he handles it forcefully enough to have a significant impact.
A Matter of Justice proves that miracles do happen. They just sometimes require a little help.
ON TV
Program: A Matter of Justice
Starring: Patty Duke, Alexandra Powers and Martin Sheen.
Airs: 9 Sunday and Monday nights on WTVJ-Ch. 4 and WPTV-Ch. 5.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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