A Father for Brittany

Andrew McCarthy pays the bills as a grieving widower who wishes to adopt a poor little baby girl. Trouble is, The Man (ie the unfeeling authorities) don't fancy letting a man look after a child on his own. Hey, it's the 90s, dudes. Lighten up.

This TVM is known as A CHANGE OF HEART in Britain . There's also another TVM with the same title that centres around a family whose father is a homosexual and the family having to come with terms with this bombshell . Some TV guides actually confused the two so I sat down expecting to see a movie where the loving husband and father comes out of the closet . Keith Lussier is always telling his wife how much he loves her and how much he's looking forward to starting a family . " What a rat " I told myself " He's saying this to his wife while he's batting for the other team " and questioned why no one noticed he seemed to be spending more time with his limp wristed buddy than with his sexy blond wife . Some people are blind . But I became more and more confused as to when the shock revelation was going to happen and as the end titles rolled I scratched my head wondering why it wasn't revealed Keith was gay . Probably because the TV guide had confused this TVM with an entirely different one

A FATHER FOR BRITTANY ( A far better title ) personifies one of those typical " disease of the week " made for television movies . There's lots of sugary sentimental scenes of tears and " I love you darling " and triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity except this one revolves around a male protagonist in an example of role reversal. It's okay if you like this sort of stuff but I'm not really keen on it and it's amazing to think that Andrew McCarthy was being touted as the next big thing in the late 1980s and this is how his career ended up as

Apparently a different version was released in the U.K. Over here we saw the sanitized version I suppose. Perhaps in the future we will have less censorship regarding gay adoption.

Still Andrew McCarthy is acceptable as a widowed father who needs to hold onto his adoptive daughter Brittany. Terri Polo, his wife suddenly succumbs to cancer, and he is left with just the grandparents to raise his child. The agency, the premise (in this version) is that he can no longer have his daughter, as the agency adopts only to father and mother. In this country with currently, a 51% divorce rate, that would not be a practical statute for an adoption agency to enforce. Having worked with attorneys who foster adoption here from Roumania, the children are certainly adopted out to single mothers AND fathers.

There are some good scenes with Shirley Knight ("As Good As it Gets") and McCarthy is very good as the father only wanting to love his daughter and retain legal custody. 8/10.

In Australia, this movie is called A Change of Heart, which really doesn't have much to do with anything but anyway, on with the review. I missed the title credits, so I spent a majority of the movie wondering who the actors that played Keith and Kim were, and why they seemed so familiar. When I realised it was Andrew McCarthy, and his wife was played by the actress who was the fiancée from Meet the Parents, that excited me a lot more than the actual movie's resolution.

The movie has its moments I suppose, where it tugs at the heartstrings and you really feel for Keith, but in the end, it was kind of easy to guess what was going to happen.