O Destino de uma Vida

I hesitated in seeing this movie for a long time because I knew that, whatever the outcome, I would be unsatisfied. However, I am willing to admit that I was wrong and the movie is a fairly accurate account of unconditional love and by the end, I was in tears. Fine acting all around.

Losing Isaiah is a movie that attempts to deal honestly with the issues of interracial adoption. Its portrayals are most always right on the mark. Halle Berry is almost unrecognizable (of course, her natural beauty gives her away) in the first part of the film. She is compelling as the "gone straight" crack addict that threw her son away. Jessica Lang gives a strong performance as the social worker who dotes on Isaiah to the point that she almost forgets her own daughter. The best part of this movie, however, is the ending, when love for the child pushes all other differences to the side. For all the movies that waste our time, this one helps to make up for it.

"Just because you f***ed some junkie in a street corner doesn't make you his mother!" / dialogue from Losing Isaiah.

The film starts with a drug addict (Halle Berry, who is surprisingly good.) goes around in one of Americas less glamorous blocks with a screaming baby. But the withdrawal symptoms becomes to strong and she lies the child in a container. When she wakes up the next day she can't find Isaiah. She is devastated. (Isaiah has been taken to the hospital when a couple of dust men found him.)

Jessica Lange, Hollywood's best actress, plays the successful doctor that sees a little crack baby lying and screaming on the ward and thinks "Wouldn't it be nice to have one of those around the house?". She adopts the little fellow and raise him together with husband and daughter.

The film jumps between Lange's family that take care of the kid and his biological mother, Berry who is building up a new drug free life. She eventually finds out that her child is alive and, of course, then wants him back. Lange doesn't want to let him go. Berry then hires a tough lawyer (Samuel L. Jackson) and trial it is.

An interesting dilemma. And the film handles it good, very good. You really want to know who will get custody and which of the two mothers who gets the ending frame (and then 'wins' the film). The ending and the ending frame unfortunately is a cowardly compromise.

A comment was made that this movie has a bad ending. This is a TRUE story that happened in San Antonio, Texas. Although Hollywood and most movie goers want a neat and tidy ending, this does not portray REAL LIFE. Indeed, this movie portrays a real situation and does it well. Makes you think a lot about our child adoption system. What is best for the CHILD is what should be the focus, however obviously biology is the only significant thing that our courts consider. This shows the child wanting and being more comfortable with the adopted family.

This was an excellent film. Halle Barry showed some real acting chops. Previous to this movie she was just in party movies, playing on her looks. She acted up against Jessica quite well.

However, the courtroom scenes were quite biased to Halle's situation. Not sure how much of the courtroom scenes were based on the real transcripts.

Jessica was excellent as always!

Try watching this movie sometime with a white woman who is the adoptive mother of an African-American child. I happen to baby-sit such a family and watched the movie with the kids' mother. I don't know how she sat through it without throwing something at the screen-not that this is necessarily a criticism. This film is very thought-provoking, though I think for the wrong reasons. The main focus is all about color and whether people should raise children of different races. Jessica Lange's character had a small speech in the courtroom about how love makes a family more than race, but it was just glossed over and the focus of the film went right back to race defining families. Maybe I just see this differently because of my close association with a family where the parents and one child are white and the other child is not, but family is not about race-corny as this may sound, it really is about love and support. The ending, as some other reviewers have said, is very wishy-washy. My viewing companion and her husband, who joined us at the end, liked it because they want to have a good relationship with their daughter's birth mother. I agree with them on that, but if the movie is going to deal with legalities so much, it should resolve those legalities at the end of the movie.