A Mother's Intuition (BroadLight Media, Releve Entertainment, Tycor International Film Company, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 3) I watched a Lifetime movie and then a surprisingly good film from the “Blaxploitation” era of Hollywood history. Both films featured largely African-American casts and were being shown as part of both Lifetime’s and Turner Classic Movies’ observances of “Black History Month.” “Black History Month” – originally known as “Negro History Week” and consisting of the second week in February before it was gradually expanded to the entire month of February – was created by African-American history professor Carter Woodson in 1926. He selected it because Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was February 12 and Frederick Douglass’s birthday was February 14. My usual TV channels are going hog-wild over it this year, and so Lifetime showed a movie made in Atlanta and featuring a mostly Black cast: A Mother’s Intuition. The central intrigue revolves around a young Black woman sculptor in Charlotte, North Carolina, Toni Lane (Debbie Boutte, who actually turns in a quite good performance in an unusually complex and multidimensional role). Toni is pregnant by her late husband Alphonso, who got her “with child” and then died in an auto accident, leaving her to raise her baby-to-be as a single mother. She’s also been diagnosed with anxiety and prescribed anti-anxiety medications, though unbeknownst to her, her (white) doctor, Linda Sydner (Rachelle Carson-Begley), has reduced her dose so her baby (a girl, as revealed by a sonogram) won’t be born with an addiction. Toni has decided to have her baby at Memorial Hospital even though her girlfriends Cicely (Brely Evans) and Martina (Laura Garrido) try to warn her that Memorial has a poor reputation, especially in dealing with Black patients.

Toni also had a troubled childhood; the story she’s told her friends is that her mother died when she was just an infant and her father abandoned the family, but later it turns out that mom is still alive and so is dad, though he’s in a wheelchair and mom is his caregiver. We see a number of dream sequences involving Toni’s traumatic childhood and early adolescence, including one in which she’s already given birth to a child out of wedlock and she’s trying to shield the baby from the assaults of her father, who’s intensely religious and doesn’t approve of Toni having brought a baby into the world without being married. All this comes out in dribs and drabs according to a sloppily constructed script by Nicole D. Sconiers, including the revelation that the hammer that drops in an early scene is actually the weapon with which Toni’s (or Cynthia’s – she had a different name back then) father assaulted and presumably killed her first child. Before we got the explanatory flashback I had assumed the hammer was simply a sculpting tool Toni had dropped during an injury while at work on a marble sculpture. All this gets unraveled by the story’s leading man, Julian Cardenas (Matt Cedeño), who after a 20-year stint with the New York Police Department has moved back to his home in Charlotte. He and Toni meet when he takes a temporary job with his brother Ramon (Joaquin Montes), who owns the stone quarry where Toni gets her raw materials. Before Toni’s baby is born Dr. Sydner gives her a warning that there’s a cyst or something detectable in the ultrasounds, but assures her that it’s nothing to worry about.

Then, about a third of the way through the movie, Toni’s water breaks while she’s having one of her traumatic nightmares and she breaks the strand of worry beads she always wears around her wrist, a gift from her husband before he passed. She’s rushed to Memorial Hospital as an emergency patient, and Dr. Ken Zarada (Jeff Marchelletta) attends her birth. Toni briefly gets to see her newborn courtesy of a nurse – or at least that’s what she assumes she is – who strolls into her room carrying a baby girl. Then, however, she lapses into unconsciousness, and when she comes to she’s told that her baby was stillborn. Toni immediately is convinced that the dead baby she’s been presented with is not hers, and her baby girl – whom she wants to name “Fior,” after a brand of gelato Julian bought her – is still alive. Julian offers to help track down the missing kid and find out what happened to her, and after a lot of exposition that was supposed to give us chair-on-the-seat thrills but turned out to be boring, ultimately he hunts down Dr. Zarada and finds the truth. In addition to being a prescription drug addict who blackmails Dr. Synder into writing him orders so he doesn’t have to write them himself (though Sconiers never bothers to explain just what hold he had over her), Zarada also attended on two births that night. The actual stillbirth was from the pregnancy of Paulette McDaniels (Michelle Dawson), an old childhood friend of Toni’s, while Toni’s baby was born alive and healthy – only Dr. Zarada switched the two babies because he thought the girl would have a better upbringing with two living parents than in the care of a single mother with a history of mental health issues.

The film raised a lot of issues its makers – writer Sconiers and director Cas Sigers-Beedles – inexplicably failed to deliver on, including the sheer arrogance of health professionals and the trauma Paulette and her husband must have faced when they were told that “their” baby wasn’t really theirs at all and she was being taken back to her biological mom. In a movie about white people the two families would have worked out some arrangement whereby all three people would have had a hand in raising Fior – I’ve seen plots like that on Lifetime before – but in a film about Black people one family has to lose out completely so the other can have a happy resolution, including (do I really have to say it?) the obligatory ending in which Toni and Julian pair up and presumably are on the way to having a kid of their own.