by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I missed last night’s “world premiere” Lifetime movie I
Didn’t Kill My Sister! but got my Lifetime
“fix” anyway via the movie they showed after that from 10 p.m. to midnight, Troubled
Child. This was actually a “problem movie”
from 2012 in which the central character is Annika Williams (Leslie Stevens),
who once had ambitions to be a dancer until she met, fell in love with and
married Zeb Williams (Carlton Wilborn), a minister who took her back to the
small town of Annevar (its precise location in the U.S. is pretty indeterminate
but it was actually “played” by L.A. and/or its suburbs) and settled in with
her. When the film starts they are raising two children; one, son Jarren
(Patrick Nicolas), is their natural offspring but the other, daughter Lexi
(McKenzie Clayton), is adopted. It’s worth noting that Zeb Williams is Black
and his wife Annika is white, and this is not at all an issue in the plot — however despairing it may
seem to work for social change, some
taboos have definitively come down — though the actor playing Jarren looks too
dark to be believable as the child of a mixed-race couple and the girl playing
Lexi is lighter-skinned and more credible as a mixed-race child even though
she’s the one we’re told was adopted! Anyway, the Williamses decide to adopt
again when they meet 11-year-old Carl (a magnificent performance by Andy Scott
Harris), whom they fall in love with immediately and who at first seems a
totally disarming and with-it kid … but given the film’s title, we know better well before the characters do. Carl turns
out to be an angry kid with a nasty temper that leads him to kill Lady, the
Williamses’ family dog; chew out a baseball coach who puts him in the outfield
when Carl thinks he should be pitching; lock his adoptive mother Annika in the
family basement and leave her there all day until Jarren comes home and rescues
her; later, suddenly push Annika into the path of an oncoming SUV — the driver
dodges out of her way just in time — and ultimately do something on a
playground involving some sort of winch, block and tackle or something that leads to a girl in Carl’s school being
clobbered in her eye. Carl then goes to visit her in hospital and, in an eerie
case of mixed signals, squeezes her arm while she’s helpless in the hospital
bed and then throws down a bunch of flowers on the bed.
The Williamses’
marriage nearly breaks up over Carl because he gets along fine with dad but is
consistently hateful and hostile with mom. At one point Zeb Williams shows Carl
an elaborate model train set and explains that his father built this for him and it took him years, and
I immediately assumed on the Chekhov principle that if you establish the
existence of a pistol in act one it has to be fired in act three, that at some point Carl would go into a
towering rage and smash the train model. Instead Carl is fascinated by it and
stares at it for hours, and the noise the model train makes reminds him,
Proust-style, of the sound of a real
train where we soon realize that something traumatic happened to him that’s
determining how he’s behaving now. Eventually the Williamses, after being
palmed off by therapists who say they need to give Carl time because he’s still
“adjusting,” realize their new son is seriously mentally ill and take him to a
therapist named Elizabeth (Dee Wallace, making a welcome appearance —
ironically Charles and I had recently seen her again in her star-making
performance in E.T. in 1982), who
commits him to an inpatient facility that particularly specializes in the
treatment of Carl’s disease, Reactive Attachment Disorder, or RAD for short.
Apparently kids get RAD when they’re abandoned by their mothers in the first 33
months of their lives, and in Carl’s case a lot more terrible stuff happened to
him, including being sexually molested both by one of his mom’s boyfriends and a woman at a foster home he was sent to after he was
taken away from his mom, who’d locked him in a room in a building next to train
tracks. He’s been in and out of so many foster homes the file on him
practically takes up all of a bankers’ box, and as Annika reads it she becomes
more and more horrified and determined to keep her family together and get Carl
whatever sort of help he needs to recover.
The ending was fairly typical
Lifetime — Carl escapes from the facility, somehow gets back home and threatens
Annika with a knife — only she out-wrestles him, gets it away from him and
subdues him long enough for the cops to take him into custody and get him back
to the facility. But the whole experience has made Annika realize that she
really does love Carl after all, despite his problems. But the film as a whole
was surprisingly sensitively done; the writer (and also the producer) was Jane
Elizabeth Ryan and the director was Jolene Adams, who not only got first-rate
performances from her leads but staged this story in a quite atmospheric
fashion. Andy Scott Harris as Carl Wiliams wears his hair in an early-Beatles
pudding-bowl (his current head shot on imdb.com has him with much shorter hair
that shows off the huge size of his ears — but then Clark Gable became a major
star despite his ears) and
director Adams and cinematographer Carmen Cabana shoot him as almost a noir character, keeping his face in half-shadow almost
throughout and projecting him as a morally ambiguous character, driven by
demons even he doesn’t understand
and capable of glare-ice switches in his overall affect and mood. The film got
shown at several festivals showcasing films by women, including the Independent
Women’s Film Festival (where Adams, Ryan and Leslie Stevens all won awards) and
the Bel-Air Festival (two awards: an Audience Award and an acting award for
Andy Scott Harris), so it obviously was aimed at some sort of theatrical release instead of just ending up
on Lifetime. It’s also quite good, especially in the context of what this
network usually shows; though the subject matter is more or less typical
Lifetime, the presentation is genuinely sensitive and caring, and as
frustrating as Carl is both for the characters and the audience, we really want to see him learn to control his demons and recover
from his mom’s early-childhood abandonment (even though one Lifetime
contributor noted that Carl’s background as depicted could also mean he’ll grow
up to be a serial killer). Troubled Child was one of the rare gems Lifetime throws out and makes up for a lot of
the garbage that afflicts this network!
