by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was a Lifetime movie from Feifer
Worldwide Productions, written, directed and produced by Michael Feifer (given the ubiquitousness of his name on
his credits, I once joked that he’d have a son whom he’d put to work as an
associate and his credit would
read, “Assistant Producer, Michael Feifer, Jr., A Michael Feifer Production”),
called Cradle Swapping, which
from the title and the basic premise — two babies are switched in a hospital
room right after they’re born — I had assumed would be Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S.
Pinafore without the laughs or the great
tunes. It actually turned out to be better than that, though (as typical of
Feifer’s work) with some egregious plot holes that made it hard to believe and
sapped audience credibility. It starts out with two couples, one affluent and
married, one lumpen and not. The lumpen couple are the ones we meet first: they are Tony
(Tyler Johnson, who as usual for a Lifetime villain is the sexiest guy in the
film!), drug dealer, thief, con artist, petty crook and, when he isn’t pursuing
those avocations, worker in an auto body shop; and his girlfriend Michelle
(Laura Slade Wiggins), whom he’s impregnated purely for mercenary reasons. He’s
heard of a sub rosa adoption
agency in New York that will pay him $50,000 for a healthy baby they can then
sell to a 1-percent childless couple for twice that. So he forces her to get
pregnant and patiently waits the usual nine months for his payday, insisting
that she have the baby at home without medical (or any other) help because
hospital or doctor bills will just eat into his profits — but she starts giving
birth on their living-room floor and finally convinces him she’s going to need
professional care or she’s going to lose the baby and he’s going to lose his
meal ticket. So they check in at the emergency room under assumed names (she
calls herself “Mary,” which in the classic Hollywood era was the all-purpose
name used to denote female innocence) and she has her child — only when the kid
is born Tony realizes that she’s desperately ill because Michelle, unbeknownst
to him (and the “unbeknownst to him” part is where this film starts to stretch
audience disbelief to the breaking point), has been shooting heroin all through
the pregnancy and the child will suffer from NAS, which is short for “Narcotic
Abstinence Syndrome” — med-speak for the way a fetus exposed to addictive drugs
in the womb will be born already addicted and will go through classic
withdrawal symptoms once he or she is no longer getting mom’s drug-infested
nutrients.
No problem: Tony just hangs out sinisterly in the area where the
various newborns have been placed after delivery and before they’re returned to
their moms, and switches ID bracelets so he can present the adoption agency
with a healthy baby girl instead of the drug-addicted one Michelle just gave
birth to. The baby Tony switches so he can sell the agency a healthy child is
Hannah, newborn daughter of Ray and Alicia Thompson (Brandon Barash, who’s
hardly in Tyler Johnson’s league as a male sex god but is considerably hotter than the common run of
Lifetime’s sympathetic leading men, and top-billed Amanda Clayton), only they
notice things oddly wrong with “their” baby from the get-go, like she cries all the time, she doesn’t seem to be “bonding” with mom
like all the experts say she should, and Alicia’s mother Joan (Patrika Darbo) —
the voice of reason in this entire movie — notes that “their” child doesn’t
look like either Alicia or Ray. They take the baby to their pediatrician, Dr.
Billing (Pamela Roylance), who diagnoses her with NAS and wonders how on earth
this nice well-to-do suburban couple could have given birth to a baby exposed
to dangerous drugs while in utero.
Alicia confesses that she became addicted to prescription opiates after
originally taking them for pain following an accident, but insists that she
broke the habit and became “clean” a year before she and Ray conceived their
child. (Once again, as with Michelle’s continuous heroin use being a surprise
to Tony. Michael Feifer asks us to believe that both Alicia’s addiction and her
recovery are total surprises to her husband Ray.) Eventually both the Thompsons
and Dr. Billing take sufficiently seriously the possibility that Hannah isn’t the Thompsons’ biological child that Dr. Billing
compares the footprint taken of Hannah after her birth to a new one taken now,
and though she can’t make a definitive comparison they look different enough
that Dr. Billing orders a DNA test which proves that the baby the Thompsons are raising isn’t their
biological offspring.
The police show up in the person of a tall, avuncular
African-American detective named Warren (John Eric Bentley), but for some
reason his manner, and in particular his calls for patience, tick the Thompsons
off. So they decide to investigate themselves, and after Ray gets the key clue
by remembering the name of the business on Tony’s uniform when he went to the
hospital to snatch their baby, Maru’s Auto Body, he and Alicia go there, get
Tony’s address, drive out there (this is supposed to be Walnut Creek,
California but the desert locations look like the Southwest and there are some
heart-stoppingly beautiful landscapes that look like Georgia O’Keeffe would
have painted them) and talk to Michelle, who gives them the whole story and
hands them her copy of the contract Tony signed with the adoption agency. Then
Tony shows up, and from the dire music and also the fact that Feifer and his
director of photography, Jordi Ruiz Masó, are making him look sexier than he
has before, complete with an enviable basket flashing at us through his grey
jeans, we can tell that he’s going there to murder Hannah in order to shut her
up — though he doesn’t notice
that her copy of the incriminating adoption contract is missing. With the
contract documents giving them the name and address of the agency, run by a
slimy dude named Mr. Valentini (Nicholas Guilak, who gives a nicely controlled
performance of seedy but superficially charming villainy), the Thompsons fly to
New York City and pose as potential customers. Somehow Ray manages to rip off
the access code to the building from the receptionist and has no trouble
hacking into the agency’s computer to find out whom they placed their girl with
— and with that information Alicia is able to trace the red-headed woman who
adopted their child. The final act depicts the confrontation between the two
women over the baby, which takes place in Central Park, and how the adoptive
mother at first wonders who this crazy woman is who wants “her” child, then
realizes Alicia is telling the truth about being the birth mother from the way
the girl bonds with her in a way
she hasn’t with the adoptive mother, and after a bit of the best anguish
Michael Feifer could write (which isn’t very anguished), finally agrees to give
the girl up, seek prosecution that will put Mr. Valentini and his slimeball
operation out of business, and continue to seek a baby to adopt, hopefully
through more reputable channels this time.
There were a few directions Feifer
could have taken this story that I was fully expecting him to use — like having
Ray Thompson be suspected of Michelle’s murder, and a final confrontation between
Alicia and the woman who unknowingly adopted her baby, leading to a court
battle in which the judge (which, given how Lifetime producers usually cast
these parts, would probably have been an African-American woman) would have
made the almost obligatory King Solomon reference as she faced the impossible
(or nearly impossible) task of deciding which woman deserved this baby more,
and maybe even reached the Solomonic decision of regularly bouncing the baby
across country so both women
could have partial custody. Cradle Swapping was actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie —
Feifer’s writing, as silly as it gets sometimes, is often quite powerful,
especially when depicting the strains this whole impossible situation puts on
the Thompsons’ marriage, and he maintains effective suspense in his direction
and takes advantage of some stunning locations, both rural and urban; also
Laura Slade Wiggins, despite having only a few scenes, turns in an indelible
performance and brings real pathos to her role as essentially a piece of human
flotsam, lured into cooperating with Tony’s scheme in the forlorn hope that his
romantic and paternal instincts would kick in and he’d marry her and let her
keep the child instead of demanding to turn it into cold, hard cash. Amanda Clayton
and Brandon Barash as the “good” couple aren’t on the level of Laura Slade
Wiggins and Tyler Johnson as the bad one, but, aided by a meatier script with
more genuine emotional conflicts than Lifetime’s actors usually get to play.
This could have been even better
than it is if Feifer hadn’t thrown in so many unbelievable plot premises and
copped out at key dramatic points, notably the ending — but even as it is, it’s
a good story and better than just about anything I’ve seen from Feifer
Worldwide aside from the even more chilling His Secret Family!
