A Place for Annie (1994)
Baby Annie is HIV positive and has been left in the clinic by her drug addicted mother. To prevent that she's deported to a home where they'd just wait for her to die, nurse Susan takes charge of Annie at her home. Two years later she plans too adopt her -- but suddenly Annie's mother reappears and demands her back. And under the law, Susan, as foster-mother, has no claim to the child.
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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Touches You
To me, this movie is perfection.
As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
Directing, editing, performance, music, adaption, message, everything is good.This movie should have won best film and performance from Sissy Spacek and Mary-Louise Parker who are superb.I almost watched this like 30 times, and every time I shed tears, this is first movie to make me that.Sissy Spacek is always good in every single movie. Mary-Louise Parker should have recognized much earlier, as her fan, she always does her best even in nobody-knows movies.More people should watch this. This is just a MUST-SEE.
I grew up watching films produced by the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Their quality was often varying, but the general approach allowed for a certain dedication to storytelling. This is one such example. It's a straightforward story on the surface, something that could have easily been produced as a cheap, tear-jerking, disease-of-the-week movie. It's not as though this type of story is inherently cheap or meaningless, it's just that the potential for overwrought melodrama is only too often realized.Here, the actors prevent that from happening. Sissy Spacek, Mary-Louise Parker, and S. Epatha Merkerson (three of my favorite actresses) perform with a level of real conversational interaction that I really appreciate. I must state, emphatically, that the script offers no individual brilliance whatsoever. This is a slice-of-life type story, one that is held together by performances and the direction of John Gray. I felt like I was watching real lives here, and maybe I was. In so much as film can ever be real, "A Place for Annie" is.
Sissy Spacek is way too righteous, and Mary Louise Parker too much a snot. What saves this movie is Joan Plowright, and Jack Noseworthy playing normal people, and they do it well. Susan Lansing is a single mother who was thrown out of her family when she became pregnant at 16. Years later she supervises a neonatal unit, and becomes outraged at the benign neglect given to aids babys. She nurtures, fosters, and want's to adopt Annie. Annie's mom, meanwhile has gotten sober and is looking for some redemption. Much follows as the two fight over the child, but the best reason to watch this move is the scene the morning after Linda almost burns down Susans house. Jack Noseworthy and Joan Plowright drive the scene, and it's the best in this movie.
After "Our Sons" with Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret, this is my favorite AIDS movie. There's no need to lavish praise on an actress like Sissy Spacek; her gift is evident as soon as she enters a scene. Spacek uses her customary savvy and elan as Susan Lansing, a nurse who falls in love with and takes in an AIDS-afflicted infant whose mother has abandoned her. The nurse sets up her home with a nanny and her own son as standby only to have the mother return and reclaim her child. Her name is Linda, a bitter, spent drug addict, and she manages to make everyone in the Lansing household ill at ease, threatening to take her baby away. She is, of course, not in any position to care for her child, and Susan, realizing this, begs her to stay. An uneasy truce develops between all concerned for the baby Annie, and it is here that the movie moves us through Linda's disappointments and despair, and the only vestige of hope she has been handed--that Annie will not be touched by disease and have a mother like Susan to raise her. Lightweight is the way I would describe Mary-Louise Parker's past work; I cannot remember any performance prior to this that was this vivid. She plays Linda like a wounded dog whose howl catches in her throat when she wants to cry. She's defensive and hostile, but her most touching moments are painfully stifled. Parker's presence runs dark and deep; she makes sure the undertow of Linda's grief lurks beneath every frame.With Joan Plowright as the nanny, and Jack Noseworthy as Susan's son, David. Would that more parents had children like him?