Just ask Clarence Darrow

I was watching “Law & Order: SVU” last night, which isn’t surprising because I’m married to a law professor . Watching that show and discussing points of law with my wife has given me what amounts to a first-year legal education. Only I didn’t have to take any exams. Lucky me.

Anyway, I was admiring the way in which Christopher Meloni works. On the show, Meloni plays Det. Elliot Stabler, the New York sex crimes cop who carries his rage just under the surface. Occasionally it breaks loose, particularly when he’s a little overzealous in either the way he arrests perps or then interrogates them.

In last night’s episode, titled “Charisma,” he and his fellow cops – played by Mariska Hargitay , Richard Belzer and Ice-T – are forced to survey the dead bodies of several children, murdered because of the manipulations of a religious zealot (played by the great bad-guy actor Jeff Kober , who hails originally from Billings, Mont.).

Each of the detectives responds in a different way. Two (Hargitay, Belzer) find outlets for their anguish, mainly by admitting the damage that it is doing to them. But the other two can’t. Ice-T ’s Det. Fin Tutuola takes a voluntary leave, while Stabler’s bosses force him to take time off – leaving his service automatic behind. Which is probably a pretty good idea, considering the expression that crosses Meloni’s face as he stands over the corpse of a child wearing the same kind of shirt as one of Stabler’s own daughters.

What Meloni expresses is everything at once: disbelief, deep and abiding pain, a sense of powerlessness and the kind of rage that so easily can lead to acts of incredible cruelty. And yet he never says a word.

What’s too bad is that Meloni is the kind of actor who seldom gets a chance to be a movie leading man. He doesn’t have the kind of good looks that such roles demand. He has too little hair and he isn’t otherwise traditionally handsome, much like Bruce Willis (only taller). And yet he’s too good to follow the example of so many other television and movie stars and resort simply to making brainless, and often brainlessly violent , action films. No, for the most part, Meloni’s work is confined to television drama.

And the problem there is that unless you watch either “SVU” or the HBO series “Oz,” or unless you caught him playing Sandpoint’s own Mark Fuhrman in the 2002 USA Network movie “Murder in Greenwich,” you may not even know who Meloni is. His movie work has, for the most part, been confined to secondary roles – Coach Bob Kelly in “Runaway Bride,” or as Freakshow in “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.”

In “Oz,” especially, he spent five years playing Chris Keller, described by the Internet Data Moviebase as a “bisexual, perverted serial killer.” Too true. But in loving the alcoholic lawyer Tobias Beecher ( Lee Tergesen ), Meloni’s Keller managed to give lie to the generally accepted notion that there’s no such thing as a sympathetic sociopath.

Meloni’s strength as “SVU” Det. Stabler is in showing how the worst of us is always there, waiting for the opportunity to escape. Few of us will ever get the chance to show how brave we are by climbing ladders into burning buildings, throwing ourselves on grenades or helping the elderly and very young get off sinking ocean liners . But as Meloni’s Stabler shows, being truly brave often means simply not giving in to our inner demons.

And no one needs a law degree to understand that.