I am usually very forgiving of B-grade films. I don't mind a good old- fashioned syrupy love story now and then, or some half-baked horror tale about a woman in some remote location fighting to save her family's haunted B&B . . . but this film . . . wow, I really can't forgive this one. It is so grossly manipulative, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, from the acting to the writing to the rainstorms of Biblical proportions. I didn't know if I was watching a Hallmark film, some silly Nickelodeon episode, or a cheap horror flick. The children are as cloying as marshmallow peeps (did no one work with these young actors, or did they just stuff them with cupcakes and candy and set them in front of the camera?). The adults--actors, director, and screen writer--didn't fare much better. I just felt bashed in the head at every turn--too much too much too much. (Towards the end of the film Penelope Miller has one of the most atrocious rain-soaked speeches I have ever seen.)
I did enjoy and appreciate Tatum O'Neal's performance. While I understand some of the harsh criticism regarding her portrayal of a severely emotionally disturbed woman, I found it to be heart breakingly realistic in the main. Of course she would drift around, half awake, half alive, twitchy and flaky and completely insecure. I actually felt sorry for this character. While I don't know how much of the story is entirely based on real events, surely placing Grace in her brother's home with his happy camper family, across the street from her former husband and his bubbly preggers wife, then given the glamorous job of sewing the baby's quilt and creating a mile-high lemon meringue pie of a ballgown for a 10 year old attending a military ball (a horrible and unnecessary story line, on several counts). . . I mean, if this is what her life has become, who wouldn't break out the sharp objects?
