Shameful Secrets

...so he walked away before the end and the movie doesn't really conclude properly after dragging more than an hour and a half with the same issue. The pianist, unfortunately, stayed all along and felt he had to play through every sing scene for drama purpose. Despite good acting all around, this movie is almost as painful to go through as the issue it is supposed to depict.

This played on Lifetime Television under the title "Going Underground," which intrigued me. There are women who go underground, changing their identities and living anonymous lives to hide themselves and their children from abusive husbands. But this never lived up to it. The heroine didn't "go underground" until the last 15 minutes of the film, and it was shown in quick stills. What did they show, then? A completely ordinary and predictable drama with every Battered Woman chicle in the book. Talk about false advertising! I felt so cheated, I wanted to batter the people who made this, especially the one who chose the title. The story and its ending will surprise only those who have never watched Lifetime Television before.

This film has two names, the one I viewed was "Going Underground" which is a better title for this type of film about a very happy looking married couple with two children. However, once the front door is shut the husband turns into another person and thinks he is in the boxing ring with his wife, who has no defense except to take all the right and left shots to the jaw. Joanna Kerns,(Maryann Walker-Tate) gave an outstanding performance through out the entire picture as the wife who struggles to keep her children and try to change the laws about abused women in the United States. Tim Matheson, (Daniel) gave a great supporting role as the most shameful husband/father you would ever want to know. This subject always needs to be told, because unfortunately women are still having to face this horrible brutality.

I suspect that the people who dislike the film may struggle with emotional issues. This film was moving, Joanne and Matthew were extremely convincing, and the young boy who played the son has to be one of the best child actors I've ever seen. The battered woman and child story is one that needs to be told over and over again so that people can understand how traumatic and horrific abuse is. This story was extremely effective, and a lifetime original.. lifetime used to make movies like this, and I wish they would move back to these types of stories, gripping, moving, and validating. This was a heart-wrenching, beautiful movie.

This could have been a great movie if I didn't have to mute it and turn the captions on because the piano was just way too much! More than half of the movie had the same piano tune in the background and it did not go with what was going on in the movie whatsoever. I started to wonder if the movie was glitched until I read another review that mentioned the same thing.

It definitely is a typical lifetime movie and hard to really connect with the characters since they really didn't go into detail with them much at all. The boy was wonderful and probably the one that was easiest to sympathize with.