TV Review : ‘Crazy in Love’: A Matriarchal Mistrust of Men

“Crazy in Love,” a title drenched in irony, is a woman’s picture that is neither feminist nor romantic. In a fierce twist for a strong female story, the emotionally abused character turns out to be a loving husband.

Starring Holly Hunter as a wife obsessed by fantasies of her husband’s imagined infidelities, the movie dramatizes the addiction of obsessive jealousy and paranoia (premiering today at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. on TNT).

What distinguishes the material (adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Luanne Rice) is the linkage between the wife’s insecurity and her family’s long history of cheating husbands. Hunter’s possessive character has absorbed into her bones three generations of matriarchal mistrust of men. In the process, a subtle tyranny has also seeped into her character.

Besides Hunter, who segues from a happy wife and burgeoning documentary filmmaker to a basket case who can’t cope with even one night apart from her lawyer husband (an earnest Bill Pullman), the cast is richly varied: Gena Rowlands is the wife’s scarred but sensitive mother; Herta Ware the endearing grandmother ravaged by age and memories, and Frances McDormand the pragmatic sister in the sensible shoes, so to speak, the clan’s one member who brushed off her husband’s fling and stuck with him because, as she grins, “I liked him too much.”

On the other hand, nothing is simple or one-dimensional in this multilayered family. These women may all be wounded by infidelity, but they are loving, bonding women who sustain one another in a lush forested world that surrounds their age-old family compound on a hideaway island paradise in Puget Sound reachable only by seaplane or ferry.

The teleplay by Gerald Ayres (whose male sensibility lends ballast to the female mood) switches the novel’s East Coast locale to the equally apt Northwest. Director Martha Coolidge nicely captures this patch of water and greenery, including locations in Seattle.

But Coolidge’s real contribution is her woman’s point of view. She rips flesh from her actors when the ante can’t go any higher. In a bruising confrontation between the exasperated breadwinner and his guilty wife, Hunter scalds and eviscerates her husband’s trust with biting details about a crazed indiscretion she indulged with a handsome photographer (Julian Sands) while her husband was in London on a business trip.

That’s the theatrical peak, but soothing terrain follows as the characters’ gritty reserves veer the story’s tone and mood off into calmer, even cyclical waters.

Notable for the heavy female contingent in front and back of the camera, “Crazy in Love” is the second Ted Turner movie in a month (coming on the heels of TNT’S “Grand Isle”) to trumpet dominant women’s themes and a largely distaff cast and crew.

As far as TV movies go, these storytellers are the second “league of their own” to come along this summer.