Stolen by Their Father (Avirofilms, Cineplex Media, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. I put on Lifetime for a heavily hyped movie that lived to my expectations: Stolen by Their Father, about Lizbeth Meredith, a young single mom in Anchorage, Alaska, who works at a battered women’s shelter because they took her in when she needed to be shielded from her physically abusive ex-husband, Grigorios “Greg” Basdaras (called “Greg Daikos” in the film). It was part of Lifetime’s “Ripped from the Headlines!” series of stories based on real-life incidents (ironically, the slogan “Ripped from the Headlines!” was actually coined by the Warner Bros. publicity department in the 1930’s to promote their movies based more or less on real life: in the 1936 film Bullets or Ballots Edward G. Robinson played a character loosely based on real-life police informer Johnny Broderick, who infiltrated the Mob and worked undercover, and to do the script Warners hired Martin Mooney, a crime journalist who had got his 15 minutes of fame for refusing to name his sources on the witness stand and going to jail for doing so: the original trailers for Bullets or Ballots even boasted, “Written by Martin Mooney – The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk!”), and it’s interesting how, even when they play fast and loose with the facts, the true-crime stories seem to impose a discipline on Lifetime’s writers and directors they don’t have when they’re just making stuff up.

This time the director was Simone Stock, a woman (though her head shot on imdb.com shows her with a man and the man is larger in the photo) with such previous credits as A Street Cat Named Bob, Earthling House Huntress and Iris. The writer is someone far more interesting: Barbara Kymlicka, whose name I’ve made nasty jokes about before when she was writing the “Whittendale Universe” movies with her former writing partner J. Bryan Dick (most of whose stories are about young women attending the elite Whittendale University and turning tricks to pay their tuition; given the high sexual content of those scripts and the amount of soft-core pornography they supplied, I couldn’t resist calling them “Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker”) but whose work here suggested I’ve been unfair. Aided by first-rate direction and a great cast – notably Sarah Drew as Lizbeth and Kimonas Kouris as Greg (oddly imdb.com only lists his character as “Father”), as well as the welcome casting of real-life sisters Valentina and Carina Battrick as Meredith’s two daughters, Marianthi and Meredith – Kymlicka turns in a great script that fully does justice to this story.

The plot deals with a highly contentious relationship between Lizbeth and Greg, who has enlisted the help of his friends in the local Greek Orthodox church so that, as soon as the requirement in their divorce agreement that his visits have to be supervised expires, he’ll take them for a weekend but he’s really going to flee the country with them and take them to his native Greece to raise. Lizbeth doesn’t realize her kids are not coming back until two days later, when the head of the day-care center she uses tells her the daughters were never dropped off at all. It takes her a while to find out that her ex-husband essentially kidnapped their daughters, and it’s only when a woman at the church blurts it out that she realizes the scumbag has taken them to Greece. For the next two years Lizbeth engages in a Kafka-esque series of tricks to find her kids, first attempting to hire an attorney. She scores a lawyer who works for then-President Bill Clinton – but he can’t do anything in the Greek legal system and he advises her to hire a Greek lawyer. He tells her that Greek courts likely favor the man over the woman in legal disputes, especially over custody, but Greece has just signed the Hague Convention which, at least in theory, requires them to respect the judicial decisions of other signatory countries, including the one granting sole custody of her daughters to Lizbeth.

Lizbeth maxes out her credit cards to raise the money to go to Greece, only to find that, even more than in the U.S., in Greece “the law is where you buy it, and how much you pay for it” (in Raymond Chandler’s memorable phrase). She contacts the Greek attorney her U.S. superlawyer recommended, and he hires a private investigator – who absconds with her money without doing anything. She also contacts the American consulate, and they are able to trace her ex and their daughters to a school in which he’s attended – only the consulate alerts the school to the fact that she’s coming for the kids, and her ex gets the word and pulls them out of school two days before she shows up to get them. Midway through her ordeal she runs out of money to stay in Greece and comes home, where she finds that the director of the women’s shelter she works at has started the 1990’s equivalent of a GoFundMe campaign and raised enough money to give her a second chance in Greece – where she actually finds her girls, only when she sees them they tell her they want to stay in Greece with their dad, who alternately told them their mom was dead and that she was alive but no longer wanted anything to do with them. (That was by far the most genuinely tragic scene in the show.)

Throughout her quest Lizbeth keeps flashing back to memories of her own childhood, in which her mother took her away from her father and took up with a new man who … well, we get a close-up of mom telling the young Lizbeth (Samantha Belfitt) to “be nice” to her new “father” while he’s licking his lips in evident anticipation of sexually molesting her. Lizbeth is convinced that if she’d had a more normal childhood, she wouldn’t have been vulnerable to Greg’s dubious charms and she never would have married him in the first place. During her second trip to Greece she ends up arrested for kidnapping, thanks to Greg swearing out a warrant against her, and though she’s released and granted three days with her daughters pending an appeal to the Greek courts, when the Greek judge (Kostas Papagiannidis) hearing Greg’s suit for custody makes his ruling, he rules in Greg’s favor, allegedly because the kids have already been in Greece for two years and it would be bad for them to uproot them.

Lizbeth’s Greek lawyer is instantly convinced that Greg’s family gets him the money to bribe the judge, and in the meantime Lizbeth has learned from her daughters that Greg was a terrible parent, constantly pulling them out of schools (the daughters tell their mom they’ve only been to school 60 days out of the two years they’ve been in the country) and not dressing or bathing them properly. (Lizbeth explains that this tallies with her own experience with Greg during their marriage, in which he stayed out late, did drugs and never could hold down a job – which he hasn’t been able to do in Greece, either. He’s been living off his relatives.) The only way out Lizbeth can think of is to escape, which she plans to do by taking a ferry from the Greek town of Thessaloniki to Turkey, where – once outside of Greek airspace – she can fly herself and her two daughters back home. There are some nice bits of suspense editing as well as an odd trick: the opening scene shows Lizbeth and her daughters being chased down the decks of the ferry by a bald man who looks like an authority figure out to bust them (typically for Lifetime, virtually the entire movie is presented as a flashback from that point), but when we see that scene again in real time the sinister figure turns out to be a crew member anxious to return a doll one of the daughters had lost on the deck. Eventually the Meredith family make it onto the plane and return to a heroine’s welcome back home.

Stolen by Their Father is an unusually effective drama, not just by Lifetime standards but by anyone’s, an exciting suspense thriller with a rare depth of emotion that seems to enter Lifetime movies when they are based (however loosely) on true-life stories. It was also nice to see the half-hour mini-documentary that showed us the real Lizbeth Meredith and also her two daughters,who have grown into well-educated adult women with a commitment to do social work. The real Lizbeth doesn’t look that much like Sarah Drew, but the post-show interview only increased my respect and admiration for her and her courage in going up against an abusive husband and an unfamiliar and frequently corrupt legal system in a country whose language she does not know. One shot I particularly liked was when Lizbeth, trying to navigate Thessaloniki’s unfamiliar streets, looks up at a street sign – and because Greek is written in a 36-letter alphabet rather than the 26-letter one we’re used to, she can’t make heads or tails of it.