by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Baby Sellers, billed as a “world premiere” Lifetime showing of a quite powerful and
well-done thriller from producer Robert Halmi, Sr. (he and Halmi, Jr. are known
for socially conscious TV-movies) which had some of the usual Lifetime
sillinesses and improbabilities, but had enough energy and power to transcend
them. The star is a young, compactly built blonde woman named Jennifer
Finnigan, who plays Detective Nicole (“Nic”) Morrison of the (presumably
fictitious) “Homeland Security Investigations” law-enforcement agency, or HSI.
When the film starts she and her male African-American partner (alas, not
identified on the cast list on imdb.com) are hot on the trail of Rafael Ochoa
(Zak Santiago), a crime kingpin involved in a number of illegal enterprises,
including smuggling undocumented immigrants into the U.S. in the backs of large
trucks. The film actually opens in a small village in India, where kidnappers
literally steal Mira, the recently born baby of a young couple, Dilip (Arjun
Gupta) and Noureen (Veena Soud), who can recognize her if they see her again
because she has a tear-shaped birthmark under her left eye. Then it cuts to the
U.S., where Nic and her partner almost catch Ochoa’s agent but the agent and Ochoa himself escape. They do, however, recover the truck in which they were smuggling
in their latest batch of undocumented immigrants — pregnant women. Ochoa is
shipping them into the U.S. so they’ll give birth on this side of la
linea and therefore the kids will be U.S.
citizens; then the babies will be taken away from their mothers and placed with
wealthy Anglo families for adoption. At the crux of all this is an adoption
agency with the typically smarmy title “Road to Love” run by Carla Huxley
(Kirstie Alley) — and I can’t help but think writer Suzette Couture
deliberately named her after an author whose most famous work is Brave
New World, a novel about the mass
production of babies. Huxley delivers a well-honed sales talk to prospective
adoptive parents in which she trots out her own Third World-born adopted
daughter Alyssa (Corale Knowles) and tells what a wonderful success her own
adoption has been — “My mom is awesome!” Alyssa tells her mom’s prospective customers, before we get a scene
between the two of them in which Carla turns out to be a tough taskmaster with
an obsessive concern about her daughter’s diet. Directed by Nick Willing, Baby
Sellers flits confusingly between the U.S.,
India and Brazil (another important stop on Carla’s baby-selling network), and
at times you have to look closely to determine which Third World country with
dirt roads, shaky buildings, grinding poverty and nut-brown people is which
(some of the switches in location are indicated by chyron titles but most
aren’t), but it’s generally well plotted and it’s powered by fascinating female
characters as both heroine and
villainess.
It’s also a movie which, despite the sometimes confusing changes in
locale, manages to tell convincingly tragic plot lines and avoid the soap-opera
trap of too much blatant tear-jerking. Nic’s round-the-world search for Carla and
her connections is counterpointed with Dilip’s desperate search to find his
baby and get her back — he even hitches a ride with the low-level thugs who
kidnapped her and Nic tries to follow them but loses them in the heavy-duty
Mumbai traffic — only to get himself killed when four of the baddies ambush him
in a warehouse just as he’s recovered his daughter and is about to take her
home. There’s also another story, of a young Brazilian girl named Dolorita
(Nicole Muñoz) who gives birth in a hospital whose principal pediatrician, Dr.
David Azevedo (Alessandro Juliani) is in league with Carla’s gang. Since the
baby’s father, who abandoned Dolorita after he knocked her up, is blond and
blue-eyed, Carla has earmarked her child for a demanding white couple who want
their adoptive baby to be white, and so Dr. Azevedo has his nurse tell Dolorita
her child died shortly after birth even though he’s really shipped the baby off
to Carla’s operatives. When Dolorita starts making trouble and leaves a report
with the U.S. consulate, a corrupt Brazilian cop and his associate in the gang
kidnap her, drive her out to a deserted area, kill her and bury her body — and
though Nic gets to Brazil too late to see Dolorita, she’s tipped off by the
existence of the consulate report and the testimony of Dolorita’s boss (she’s a
barista at a Brazilian coffeehouse) to the effect that she’s never been late
for work before and now she hasn’t shown up at all. Nic got to do this
round-the-world tour only because her Black partner was blown up in a house
Ochoa had booby-trapped early on, but she’s forced to rely on local police for
backup and seemingly all the
local police she’s told to contact are corrupt and being paid off by Carla’s
gang. Eventually she’s ambushed by the same corrupt cop who killed Dolorita,
but she shows off some impressive martial-arts skills, subdues the guy and gets
his gun, and later she does the same to Rafael Ochoa himself in a meeting
between them and Carla she’s set up to try to entrap Ochoa into confessing —
only Carla grabs Ochoa’s gun after Nic disarms him, shoots Ochoa, claims self-defense and gets
off, though at least she’s out of the baby business.
Afterwards there’s a title
about the impact of human trafficking, including the claim that it’s now the
world’s second largest and most lucrative criminal enterprise (after drugs but
before weapons), which reminds us that the Halmis were also the producers of
the Lifetime movie Human Trafficking,
which was a pretty bad production which, when I reviewed it for imdb.com, I
headlined my review with the phrase, “Good intentions doth not a great movie
make.” I wouldn’t call Baby Sellers
a great movie, either, but it’s far better than Human Trafficking; it’s not only a fast-paced, exciting thriller (we
open in the middle of a chase scene instead of getting the usual 20 to 40
minutes’ worth of dull exposition typical of Lifetime’s thrillers) but it has
two great tour de force roles for
women. Kirstie Alley is absolutely brilliant, capturing not only the
character’s evil but the smarmy self-righteousness and gooey sentimentality
with which she conceals the evil not only from the people she interacts with
but from herself; as I wrote about her the last time I saw her play a
villainess in a Lifetime movie, as the murdering mother Brenda Geck in Family
Sins, I wrote that she played the killer
mom (who got her sons to be accomplices in her crimes) “neither as raving
psycho nor coolly collected psycho but as a woman constantly on the defensive,
able so totally to compartmentalize her mind (what George Orwell called
‘doublethink’) that she can not only declare herself the world’s greatest
mother and get other people to believe her but believe it herself as well.” She
shows the same skill here — and she’s matched by Jennifer Finnigan, who manages
to be just as tough as Mariska Hargitay in Law and Order: Special
Victims Unit without being either as
self-consciously butch or as annoyingly schoolmarmish. Finnigan’s combination
of little-slip-of-a-girl appearance, implacable will and surprising toughness
and skill with the action scenes is remarkable, eminently watchable and makes
me wish the Halmis and Lifetime would get together and build a series around
this remarkable actress and her character here.
