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Snap decision can't be undone, only adds to family heartbreak
By Ellen Gray
PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS
April 12, 2008
If we needed any more proof of the gender gap at the box office, it's that “The Memory Keeper's Daughter” is premiering this weekend on Lifetime.
Based on Kim Edwards' best-seller about a family fractured by a secret, it stars Dermot Mulroney, Gretchen Mol and Emily Watson, all actors I've paid to see on bigger screens than the one in my living room.
A family saga that spans a generation, “Daughter” is about what happens when David Henry (Mulroney), a young doctor, is forced to deliver his own twin offspring in the middle of a snowstorm and discovers one has Down syndrome.
It's 1964, a time when doctors routinely recommended institutionalization for such children, and David, resolving to tell his wife, Norah (Mol), that one of the twins died, sends his infant daughter, Phoebe, off with a nurse to be delivered to a home for the mentally disabled.
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“The Memory Keeper's Daughter”
Father sends his daughter to an institution
When: 9 tonight
Where: Lifetime
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Aghast, the nurse, Caroline (Watson), makes a snap decision to raise Phoebe herself.
But David, too, has made a snap decision, one he proves incapable of undoing. And even as he uses his passion for photography to document the perfect family life he lied to protect, the family is falling apart.
What TV movies lack in big-screen prestige, they can sometimes make up for in time. It would have been good if Lifetime's ambitions had extended to telling this story over more than one night, but as it is, “The Memory Keeper's Daughter” is still another worthy attempt to raise the bar by a network that's no longer so easily pigeonholed.
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