by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on
last night’s “world premiere” Lifetime movie, the awkwardly titled Taking
Back: Finding Haley, shown at
the tail end of a day of movies about child kidnapping and telling a supposedly
fact-based story (though the Lifetime Web site doesn’t give a clue as to where
the actual case took place or what the names of the real people were, and
nobody contributing to imdb.com has put up that information either) in which
the central character is Karen Turner (Moira Kelly). When we first meet her
she’s happily married to Tim (Toby Levins) and they have a three-year-old
daughter they’ve named Haley (as in Alex?); we’re not told what Tim does for a
living but Karen is a photographer whose work is considered good enough she’s
been exhibited in art galleries. She has her camera out that fateful afternoon
when she puts Haley on a merry-go-round and starts taking pictures of her, then
turns her camera away momentarily to get a shot of something else, then turns
back to the merry-go-round — and Haley is gone! Though director Mark Jean
(working from a script by Brian D. Young) is hardly the first to capture the
sinister side of carnival imagery in general and the merry-go-round in
particular (remember Alfred Hitchcock and the ending of Strangers on a Train?), he does quite a good job of underscoring
how quickly a place associated with joy and innocent merriment can turn
into something pretty horrific. The next sequence takes place “Two Years Later,” and we quickly learn
that Haley has never been found — dead or alive — that Tim has decided it’s time to “move
on” and let go of the grief surrounding the loss of their daughter, but Karen
has not forgotten her, is convinced that Haley is still alive out there
somewhere and is actively searching for her and giving the nice, avuncular
African-American detective assigned to Haley’s case a hard time, calling him
every week to ask if there are any new leads.
Tim has decided to end the
marriage and he’s seen bringing over the paperwork establishing Karen as the
sole owner of their house, and though he advises her to sell it she insists
that she’s going to keep it exactly as it was when Haley disappeared so
everything will be in readiness when Haley is found and returns home. We get a
scene of Karen terrorizing a local girl on a swing in a playground when she’s
convinced she’s Haley — and, needless to say, she isn’t and the girl’s actual
mother thinks she’s some sick weirdo and reports her to the police. The next
title says, “Ten Years Later,” and
we learn that Karen is still convinced that Haley is alive, and though she’s moved from the town of
Atwater, California to nearby Colwood she’s still keeping the house in Atwater
and has basically kept it as a shrine to Haley. She’s working as the official
photographer for the local high school, and needless to say she latches on to
one of the female students and is convinced she is her long-lost Haley. The
student is Emma (Kacey Rohl),who’s got a best friend named Alexis whom she can
hardly ever see because her mother Susan (Amanda Tapping) is so fiercely
overprotective she won’t let Emma go to parties with her age peers or even walk
home from school. At first we think she’s just an overprotective parent — her
husband Dave (David Cubitt) even tells her she ought to lighten up on Emma and
let her have her teenage rebellion — but later on it turns out that her actual
daughter died in a bathtub accident at age three and she regularly visits the
gravesite and lays flowers at the tombstone — which has no name or dates of
birth and death, just a bas-relief of a cherub and the words, “Our Little
Angel.”
Where I had thought this was going was that Dave and Susan had done a grey-market adoption
and didn’t know their child had actually been kidnapped from her real parents —
but no-o-o-o-o, eventually
it develops that Susan actually kidnapped Haley/Emma from that merry-go-round
because she resembled her real, dead daughter — and Dave, despite his moral
misgivings, went along with it and raised the child as his and Susan’s own. For
the first half Taken Back is actually a quite good thriller, allowing for the usual Lifetime
melodramatics, but in the second half it (in the immortal words of Monty
Python) just gets silly: the turning point is in the ludicrous scene in which,
having already traced Emma back to her parents’ home (the sight of Karen and
Susan surveilling each other is pretty bizarre in itself!), she breaks in one
afternoon and has to do a series of farcical hidings-out from the housemaid and
from Dave, who comes home unexpectedly from his work as a realtor (or is that a
Realtor™?), before she slips out again, but not without first scoring a
soft-drink can Emma has drunk out of and given to her friend Megan, a clerk at
the Colwood police department, and asked her to run a fingerprint check on it.
(Perhaps from having seen too many episodes of Law and Order: Special
Victims Unit, I was
expecting her to ask Megan to have a DNA test run on any stray saliva that
might have stuck to the can as Emma drank out of it — and someone on an
imdb.com message board wondered about that, too — but Brian D. Young’s script
didn’t get that high-tech.)
Megan runs the test on her laptop at home and is startled to find that her
paranoiac friend is right after all — Emma’s and Haley’s fingerprints match —
but she doesn’t get to tell Karen that because in the meantime Karen has
kidnapped Emma and taken her to the old house in Atwater, and Susan has gone
ballistic, got a gun, gone to Megan’s place and, acting under the
misapprehension that Megan is her daughter’s tormentor and kidnapper,
confronted her, whereupon they struggled, they both reached for the gun
(Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his three houses and
five cars, including a Rolls-Royce and two BMW’s) and Megan is (apparently)
fatally shot. So Susan runs home to her husband Dave and says they have to get
Emma back and then leave town immediately — and Dave thinks this is another
hysterical outburst from his wife until he finally gets sufficiently convinced
that she’s done something terrible that he insists they drive out to the house
where all this happened and call the police from there. Meanwhile, Karen is
trying to convince Emma that she’s really Haley — all Emma wants to do is get
the hell out of there and get back with her family — until Susan shows up
brandishing a gun and not only confronting Karen with it but threatening Emma’s
own life when Emma goes to hide in the bathroom and Susan shoots the lock off
the bathroom door.
Eventually the police, led by that avuncular
African-American detective Karen has been harassing for 12 years, crash the
place and arrest Susan for the murder of Megan (or attempted murder, since
there’s an ambiguous scene at the end that takes place in a hospital and hints
that Megan may actually survive), while it’s unclear what happens to Karen (she
is guilty of
kidnapping, after all, and she has a criminal record) and Emma a.k.a. Haley is
obviously severely traumatized by the whole thing and one wonders how screwed
up she is going to
be in later life now that all the secrets of her parentage are known and her
adoptive mom is a killer and her real mom a kidnapper. (Megan and Dave are
really the only sympathetic characters in this whole stew.) Apparently Taken
Back is destined
for a theatrical release in Canada even though its U.S. debut was on Lifetime —
there’s one scene towards the end in which Dave says “Goddamn” and the “God-”
part was erased from the soundtrack in line with the prissy morals of U.S.
basic-cable TV (frankly, my dear, I don’t give a Goddamn!) — and all in all
it’s a better-than-average Lifetime movie, though quite frankly it would have
been better if they’d toned down the melodramatics, not pushed both the mothers into committing serious crimes
and led to the scene I was expecting, in which the avuncular African-American
cop would have taken King Solomon’s role and got both Karen and Susan to
realize that by continuing their destructive confrontation over Emma/Haley they
were only going to destroy her psychologically.
