Choices

Especially for a TV movie, I found this very well acted. Jacqueline Bisset is very convincing - I found her character quite complex. Poised yet sympathetic. A moving story.

This is one of those movies that tries to be provocative. - here the issue is abortion. Don't bother.

Melissa Gilbert is Terry Granger, the 19 year old law student daughter of 62 year old New York retired judge Evan (George C Scott) and his 38 year old wife former concert pianist Marisa (Jacqueline Bisset). Terry finds she is pregnant to her ex-boyfriend medical student Scott (Steven Flynn) and must face her father's objections to her having an abortion. The issue becomes complicated when Marisa too becomes pregnant.

Gilbert wears her wavy brown hair in a short triangle style and gives spunk to Terry as a rebellious teen. We see Terry swimming laps in a one-piece suit, wearing an American Rock Café waitress uniform, and dancing in a low-backed short slinky shiny black dress wearing glitter eye make-up. Although she can't match Scott's intensity, Gilbert tries hard, smiling at one of his jokes, and using an effective pause before answering a question. She is vulnerable when telling Scott about the pregnancy, and touching when crying with Marisa, though later she squeezes her eyes to force the tears.

The teleplay by Judith Parker includes pro-choice and the right-to-lifer's via picketing outside a clinic, and the treatment is free of cliché. Director David Lowell Rich uses an odd low angle for Terry's dancing, and presents Bisset unflatteringly. She doesn't embarrass herself opposite Scott, who is gruff and funny, but she does have a stream-of-consciousness monologue in a church that she strains to perform.

For January 1999 it might not be provacitive. But for 1986 it was. It was for that period a gutsy TV movie to make.

Melissa Gilbert is convincingly cast as a haughty rich kid in New York City, the daughter of a recently-retired judge who has married for the second time, who is busy failing her courses at college and fighting with her boyfriend over commitment issues when she discovers she's five weeks pregnant. Actually, we find out before she does: in the movie's first few minutes, Gilbert is alternately eating and throwing up at her father's fancy get-together (alert! Plot predicament ahead!). She doesn't want to tell Dad her secret--who doesn't buy into the whole abortion argument--though she does confide in her 38-year-old stepmother, a supporter of a woman's right to choose (and who soon finds she's expecting as well!). Tacky TV-movie from director David Lowell Rich is full of gaffes and poor editing decisions, not to mention talented actors George C. Scott and Jacqueline Bisset looking uncomfortable in their roles. As for our heroine, Gilbert takes a waitressing job at the "American Rock Cafe"--featuring Beatles dolls in the lobby--simply as an excuse to pad the movie with teenagers and blaring music (and, later, shots of Gilbert gettin' down on the dance floor). Later, we see her go back to a boy's apartment and fall seductively on his bed (alert! She's asking for more trouble!) before suddenly gaining a conscience and leaving. No one in the film seems very smart in their arguments, and the sidesteps writer Judith Parker takes in trying to explain how two modern women can get unexpectedly pregnant in this era of birth control is idiotic. "Choices" wants to explore all sides of a controversial topic; however, by using unappealing people as voice boxes, it never gets out of the gate. *1/2 from ****