Black Girl Missing (Johnson Production Group, Motion Content Group, Lifetime,2023), and Beyond the Headlines: Black Girl Missing (AMS Pictures, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 4) I watched a much-ballyhooed Lifetime movie called Black Girl Missing that more than lived up to the hype. It was a personal project for its star, Garcelle Beauvais, who plays Cheryl Baker, widowed mother of two teenage girls, Lauren (Iyana Halley) and Marle pronounced “Marley” (Tay8lor Mosby). Beauvais also executive-produced the film and narrated a documentary called Behind the Headlines: Black Girl Missing that was shown right after it. The promos for the film made clear that one of its messages would be an anti-racist statement that in the world of tabloid journalism and social media, Black lives don’t matter, at least nowhere nearly as much as white lives. I give credit to director Delmar Washington and writer Kyle Futterman for expertly threading the fine line between making the anti-racist point without overdoing it and getting preachy. One way they pull this off was by having the disappearance of the central character’s older daughter Lauren, who goes missing after a troubled weekend at home from college, coupled with that of a white girl from Oregon, Jessica Russo. Cheryl contacts the local TV news station and finds out that their corporate owners have decided to make Jessica Russo’s story the object of a nationwide search while Lauren’s story, even though it’s local, is simply deemed not important enough to deserve any of their precious airtime. Cheryl works with a reporter for the station named Elise (Linda Park), whom she appeals to as both a fellow mother and a fellow person of color (though Asian instead of Black), and Elise does her best but her hands are tied and her own job is vaguely threatened if she keeps pushing Lauren’s story. Cheryl also reports Lauren’s disappearance to the police, who assign the case to a Detective Dean, but most of Cheryl’s calls to him go to voicemail and even when they talk, he’s dismissive of her and says that as an 18-year-old Lauren is under no legal obligation to maintain contact with her one surviving parent.

Lauren’s younger sister Marle joins the hunt for the missing Lauren and ultimately gets in touch with a group of amateur computer hackers who get together online and work to solve unsolved crimes. Thanks to the efforts of a 16-year-old white girl on this network who is a whiz at hacking, Cheryl and Marle are finally able to unlock Lauren’s laptop – at least the one she left behind rather than the new one her abductor gave her when he was still posing as a man roughly her own age who was romantically interested in her – and they discover Lauren was being bullied at school by her dorm roommate, Annie Dolan (Taylor Ann Thompson). They have two suspects, Annie and Eddie Brick (Zack Gold), the supervisor at the coffeehouse where Lauren worked and sort of a Harvey Weinstein in training, always hitting on the young women who work there and threatening their jobs if they don’t go along with him. But both of them have solid alibis for the night Lauren was taken. Through the computer and information in the receipt for the items Lauren received from her online “admirer” through Amazon.com, Cheryl and Marle are finally able to trace her abductor to a local record store where a young man works. Cheryl learns that the photo on the dating app where Lauren met her captor is really named Charlie,m but his photo was “catfished” by Lauren’s abductor and identified as “Ian Turner” – or “Robert Gregory,” the name he’s using when Marle decides to go on line herself and pose as a young woman interested in this man, a stratagem which understandably horrifies her mom. “I’ve already lost one daughter to this creep! I don’t want to risk losing another one!” Mom says. Ultimately, after Lauren has been missing for 40 days, Cheryl finally tracks her down and discovers her still alive on the outskirts of the town where all this took place, Blue Valley, Texas. Laurenm is being held captive in a ramshackle old house on the property, and we get just a brief glimpse of her captor – a tall, heavy-set, balding man with a full beard, who kooks nothing like Charlie’s online photo – before they wrestle, he gets hold of her and it looks like he’s about to kill her when the police, alerted by Marle, finally show up and arrest him.

Black Girl Missing is an excellent drama, continuing the run of three quite good fact-based movies Lifetime has been showing over the last few weeks as their Saturday night “premieres.” It’s got everything we could want from a LIfetime movie: a coherent plot, excellent acting (particularly by Garcelle Beauvais, for whom, as I mentioned earlier, this was a personal project and not just another paycheck), quality suspense direction by Delmar Washington and an overall visceral feeling of excitement mixed with loathing for whoever the creep is who put Lauren into this. There’s even a nice ironic twist in Kale Futterman’s script: after Elinse finally wins the battle with her superiors at the local TV station to do a feature on Lauren’s disappearance, it’s pulled from the air because Jessica Russo, the white girl in Oregon who the station and its corporate masters thought was more newsworthy than the Black girl in their own backyard,has just been found. Only it turns out that Jessica Russo really did just run away from home, while one of the police excuses for not doing more to find Lauren’was the idea that she jad just run away.

My only qualm about Black Girl Missing is that either of the two real-life disappearances of teenage Black girls profiled in the Behind the Headlines documentary shown just after it might have made a better basis for a movie. One was the abduction of Kyla Flagg from her home in Snellville, Georgia, a suburb just north of Atlanta, in May 2021 and was fortunately found alive a month and a half later. The other was Joniah Walker, who disappeared from her home in Milwaukee in June 2022 and whose whereabouts remain unknown. Both Kyla and Joniah were children of divorced parents who shared custody, and I suspect one reason writer Futterman made Cheryl Baker in Black Girl Missing a widow instead of a divorcée was to avoid reinforcing the racist stereotype that Black people can’t keep relationships together. Kyla was lured from her home by a Texas pedophile named Robert David Fyke, who communicated with her through social media for over a month before he literally came to Georgia to pick her up. His car was photographed by her father’s “ring camera,” a surveillance tool mounted as part of his doorbell, and authorities checking out Fyke noticed the same car parked outside his home in Texas. But the story gets worse; once he got tired of her he unloaded her onto another sicko, this time in Connecticut, and that’;s where her parents finally found her alive. Aside from begging the question of just how she got to Connecticut – my guess would be that her “purchaser” drove out to Texas to pick her up – this is uncomfortably reminiscent of the whole reason African-Americans exist in the first place: their ancestors were captured and taken here to be slaves, and among the privileges of slaveowners was the right to force themselves sexually on any of their slaves because the slaves had o legal right to resist.

Black Girl Missing was produced by Lifetime and their producers, Johnson Production Group and Motion Content Group, as part of a month-long commitment to program shows featuring violence against women in an effort to bring public awareness. There’s even a Web site for an organization called Black and Missing, Inc.,https://www.blackandmissinginc.com/, and while no one from Black and Missing appears in the fiction film an actress, Jeanette Branch, plays the fictional “Loretta Nix” from that organization. Also, Tanesha Howard, real-life mother of Joniah Walker, is listed as one of the characters in the film and is played by actress Elisha Davis. Black Girl Missing is a first-rate production and one fully worthy of your attention.