Monday, August 14, 2017

Cradle Swapping (Feifer Worldwide, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My “feature” last night was a Lifetime movie from Feifer Worldwide Productions, written, directed and produced by Michael Feifer (given the ubiquitousness of his name on his credits, I once joked that he’d have a son whom he’d put to work as an associate and his credit would read, “Assistant Producer, Michael Feifer, Jr., A Michael Feifer Production”), called Cradle Swapping, which from the title and the basic premise — two babies are switched in a hospital room right after they’re born — I had assumed would be Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore without the laughs or the great tunes. It actually turned out to be better than that, though (as typical of Feifer’s work) with some egregious plot holes that made it hard to believe and sapped audience credibility. It starts out with two couples, one affluent and married, one lumpen and not. The lumpen couple are the ones we meet first: they are Tony (Tyler Johnson, who as usual for a Lifetime villain is the sexiest guy in the film!), drug dealer, thief, con artist, petty crook and, when he isn’t pursuing those avocations, worker in an auto body shop; and his girlfriend Michelle (Laura Slade Wiggins), whom he’s impregnated purely for mercenary reasons. He’s heard of a sub rosa adoption agency in New York that will pay him $50,000 for a healthy baby they can then sell to a 1-percent childless couple for twice that. So he forces her to get pregnant and patiently waits the usual nine months for his payday, insisting that she have the baby at home without medical (or any other) help because hospital or doctor bills will just eat into his profits — but she starts giving birth on their living-room floor and finally convinces him she’s going to need professional care or she’s going to lose the baby and he’s going to lose his meal ticket. So they check in at the emergency room under assumed names (she calls herself “Mary,” which in the classic Hollywood era was the all-purpose name used to denote female innocence) and she has her child — only when the kid is born Tony realizes that she’s desperately ill because Michelle, unbeknownst to him (and the “unbeknownst to him” part is where this film starts to stretch audience disbelief to the breaking point), has been shooting heroin all through the pregnancy and the child will suffer from NAS, which is short for “Narcotic Abstinence Syndrome” — med-speak for the way a fetus exposed to addictive drugs in the womb will be born already addicted and will go through classic withdrawal symptoms once he or she is no longer getting mom’s drug-infested nutrients.

No problem: Tony just hangs out sinisterly in the area where the various newborns have been placed after delivery and before they’re returned to their moms, and switches ID bracelets so he can present the adoption agency with a healthy baby girl instead of the drug-addicted one Michelle just gave birth to. The baby Tony switches so he can sell the agency a healthy child is Hannah, newborn daughter of Ray and Alicia Thompson (Brandon Barash, who’s hardly in Tyler Johnson’s league as a male sex god but is considerably hotter than the common run of Lifetime’s sympathetic leading men, and top-billed Amanda Clayton), only they notice things oddly wrong with “their” baby from the get-go, like she cries all the time, she doesn’t seem to be “bonding” with mom like all the experts say she should, and Alicia’s mother Joan (Patrika Darbo) — the voice of reason in this entire movie — notes that “their” child doesn’t look like either Alicia or Ray. They take the baby to their pediatrician, Dr. Billing (Pamela Roylance), who diagnoses her with NAS and wonders how on earth this nice well-to-do suburban couple could have given birth to a baby exposed to dangerous drugs while in utero. Alicia confesses that she became addicted to prescription opiates after originally taking them for pain following an accident, but insists that she broke the habit and became “clean” a year before she and Ray conceived their child. (Once again, as with Michelle’s continuous heroin use being a surprise to Tony. Michael Feifer asks us to believe that both Alicia’s addiction and her recovery are total surprises to her husband Ray.) Eventually both the Thompsons and Dr. Billing take sufficiently seriously the possibility that Hannah isn’t the Thompsons’ biological child that Dr. Billing compares the footprint taken of Hannah after her birth to a new one taken now, and though she can’t make a definitive comparison they look different enough that Dr. Billing orders a DNA test which proves that the baby the Thompsons are raising isn’t their biological offspring.

The police show up in the person of a tall, avuncular African-American detective named Warren (John Eric Bentley), but for some reason his manner, and in particular his calls for patience, tick the Thompsons off. So they decide to investigate themselves, and after Ray gets the key clue by remembering the name of the business on Tony’s uniform when he went to the hospital to snatch their baby, Maru’s Auto Body, he and Alicia go there, get Tony’s address, drive out there (this is supposed to be Walnut Creek, California but the desert locations look like the Southwest and there are some heart-stoppingly beautiful landscapes that look like Georgia O’Keeffe would have painted them) and talk to Michelle, who gives them the whole story and hands them her copy of the contract Tony signed with the adoption agency. Then Tony shows up, and from the dire music and also the fact that Feifer and his director of photography, Jordi Ruiz Masó, are making him look sexier than he has before, complete with an enviable basket flashing at us through his grey jeans, we can tell that he’s going there to murder Hannah in order to shut her up — though he doesn’t notice that her copy of the incriminating adoption contract is missing. With the contract documents giving them the name and address of the agency, run by a slimy dude named Mr. Valentini (Nicholas Guilak, who gives a nicely controlled performance of seedy but superficially charming villainy), the Thompsons fly to New York City and pose as potential customers. Somehow Ray manages to rip off the access code to the building from the receptionist and has no trouble hacking into the agency’s computer to find out whom they placed their girl with — and with that information Alicia is able to trace the red-headed woman who adopted their child. The final act depicts the confrontation between the two women over the baby, which takes place in Central Park, and how the adoptive mother at first wonders who this crazy woman is who wants “her” child, then realizes Alicia is telling the truth about being the birth mother from the way the girl bonds with  her in a way she hasn’t with the adoptive mother, and after a bit of the best anguish Michael Feifer could write (which isn’t very anguished), finally agrees to give the girl up, seek prosecution that will put Mr. Valentini and his slimeball operation out of business, and continue to seek a baby to adopt, hopefully through more reputable channels this time.

There were a few directions Feifer could have taken this story that I was fully expecting him to use — like having Ray Thompson be suspected of Michelle’s murder, and a final confrontation between Alicia and the woman who unknowingly adopted her baby, leading to a court battle in which the judge (which, given how Lifetime producers usually cast these parts, would probably have been an African-American woman) would have made the almost obligatory King Solomon reference as she faced the impossible (or nearly impossible) task of deciding which woman deserved this baby more, and maybe even reached the Solomonic decision of regularly bouncing the baby across country so both women could have partial custody. Cradle Swapping was actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie — Feifer’s writing, as silly as it gets sometimes, is often quite powerful, especially when depicting the strains this whole impossible situation puts on the Thompsons’ marriage, and he maintains effective suspense in his direction and takes advantage of some stunning locations, both rural and urban; also Laura Slade Wiggins, despite having only a few scenes, turns in an indelible performance and brings real pathos to her role as essentially a piece of human flotsam, lured into cooperating with Tony’s scheme in the forlorn hope that his romantic and paternal instincts would kick in and he’d marry her and let her keep the child instead of demanding to turn it into cold, hard cash. Amanda Clayton and Brandon Barash as the “good” couple aren’t on the level of Laura Slade Wiggins and Tyler Johnson as the bad one, but, aided by a meatier script with more genuine emotional conflicts than Lifetime’s actors usually get to play. This could have been even better than it is if Feifer hadn’t thrown in so many unbelievable plot premises and copped out at key dramatic points, notably the ending — but even as it is, it’s a good story and better than just about anything I’ve seen from Feifer Worldwide aside from the even more chilling His Secret Family!