by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the “world premiere” movie on Lifetime, a
true-life based thriller called Kidnapped: The Hannah Anderson Story which turned out to be quite good, a nail-biter
which offered some new and unusual twists on Lifetime’s usual “pussy-in-peril” genre. Since 16-year-old Hannah Anderson (Jessica Amlee)
was living in San Diego with her mother Tina (Trilby Glover) and eight-year-old
brother Ethan (Gavin Collins), the story got a certain amount of “play”
locally, though I’m not a big enough fan of either tabloid journalism (in print
or on TV) or social media to have experienced the “play” it got there. The film
was written by Peter Sullivan (who also directed), Hans Wasserburger and
Jeffrey Schenck, and impressively it begins after Hannah is kidnapped — not by the sinister stranger
generations of fictions like this one has taught us to fear, but by a neighbor
and family friend, James DiMaggio (Scott Sullivan). The San Diego County
Sheriff’s Department and the FBI have worked together to track down DiMaggio
and finally caught up with him in a remote forest in Idaho — DiMaggio having
taken Hannah from her home in the rustic San Diego suburb of Lakeside first to
Nevada and then Idaho — and an FBI sniper has taken DiMaggio down and allowed
Hannah to be rescued. Hannah’s parents had divorced well before this occurred
and she was living in Lakeside with her mom and brother, while dad Brett (Brian
Anderson) had relocated to Tennessee with a new partner but, with Hannah’s
release, has come slamming back into her life, putting so intense a level of
control over her actions and movements she would have been forgiven for
thinking she’d been kidnapped all over again. The main reason he’s become so
hyper-controlling is that her story has become a tabloid media sensation, and
he wants her neither to leave the house nor to go online for fear she’ll be
entrapped in the media frenzy and will give an ill-thought-out interview that
will get her on record as saying something embarrassing and/or easily twisted.
Of course, in the absence from any comments from Hannah or her surviving family
— for her mom and brother are both dead, killed by DiMaggio, who tied them up,
put them in the garage, beat them to death with a golf club and then torched
the house where they and Hannah had been living before holding a gun to her
head and forcing her to leave with him — the gap is filled by wild
speculations, including calling Hannah “the Lakeside Lolita” and saying she was
having a consensual affair with DiMaggio and that’s why she agreed to run off with him after (in one
especially sordid variant) helping him off her mom and brother.
The first
half-hour of Kidnapped is a
wickedly funny satire of the feeding frenzy that surrounds any celebrity, including one of the “instant” ones
created by the media mob after someone just happens to have some association with something terrible
that makes their life a “news” event. Media outlets who send reporters out to
stage these attacks on people often defend them by saying their targets are
celebrities who have “chosen” this lifestyle, or at least have learned to
accept (or, in their minds, should
have learned to accept), being hounded by the press 24/7 as one of the prices
of money and fame — but that’s B.S.: they treat people who haven’t sought celebrity exactly the same way. Out of sheer
frustration at the way she’s being reported when a school friend of Hannah’s
finally shows her what they’re saying about her online, Hannah responds on one
of the Hannah Anderson message boards with a few posts of her own — which, of
course, only excites further media attention when the people running that board
realize they’re talking to the real one. Eventually Hannah, out of sheer
frustration over the way she’s being lied about, insists that her dad allow her
to accept the invitation of The Today Show to do an interview, and the bulk of the film consists of the story of
her abduction and captivity at DiMaggio’s hands as she tells it on Today — including a few “cheats,” behind-the-scenes
footage of the police and FBI efforts to locate her (which succeed more through
sheer luck than anything else — during their travails in the wilderness she and
DiMaggio are stumbled upon by a party of four people, two men and two women, on
horseback, and one of the men not only looks like he just rode out of a Western
movie but is actually a retired sheriff who pieces together the whole thing and
reports Hannah’s and her kidnapper’s location to the FBI) which she couldn’t
have been a witness to first-hand. The one person who’s posted a review to
imdb.com so far, “wes-connors” (I presume that’s just Netspeak for “Wes
Connors”), criticized the film for putting the end at the beginning and
therefore vitiating any will-she-make-it-or-won’t-she? suspense — but I quite
liked this the way it was and particularly liked the implied social critique —
“This is the way the media guessed it … this is the way you out there, with
your sick minds, imagined it … now
this is the way it really was.”
Indeed, this was one of the best things I’ve seen on Lifetime in quite some
time, well scripted, well directed and well acted — Jessica Amlee hit just the
right note of dramatic perkiness in her pre-abduction scenes with her mom and
brother and turned in a performance of enough depth and power to suggest she
(unlike all too many Lifetime heroines before her) will actually learn
something and grow as a person from her ordeal. And Scott Patterson matches her
as DiMaggio; though one brief scene involving the law officers indicates that
his dad committed a similar crime and killed himself when he was cornered
(which just adds to the urgency with which the authorities are seeking
DiMaggio, Jr.), for the most part he seems just right as a man being driven by
appetites he can barely understand,
let alone control — he just seems like your average next-door neighbor who went
off the deep end when a little girl he’d known all her life suddenly blossomed
into a sexually mature woman and he got such a bad case of the hots for her he
was willing to do anything to get
into her pants, no matter how evil, crazy or both. The fact that real-life kids
are probably far more in danger of being kidnapped, molested or both from
people they know (like Danielle Van Dam’s killer, David Westerfield) than from
the largely mythical strangers in raincoats both kids and their parents are
taught to fear is at the heart of this film (and the real-life incident that
inspired it) and one of the best lessons it offers, though it’s mainly a
surprisingly high-class piece of entertainment that makes Hannah’s struggles —
both during her kidnapping and with the public media thereafter — all too real
and allow us to identify with them.
