Unspeakable Acts

I love when a top-billed star only turns up long after the movie starts. Since Jill Clayburgh is the top-billed star, you might think that she would show up before the 30 minute mark. Then again, reading the synopsis, I had no idea that Bebe Neuwirth was in this one at all.

Okay, so Bebe Neuwirth (aka Lilith from “Cheers”) is a new mother, or at least that's the way it seems. Of course the fact that her kid can walk, talk and carry on conversations makes me think that she's a little older. It's even more confusing when one of her friends makes a comment about how it's the first time she ever left the kid with a sitter. Seriously? Even the psycho moms I knew left their kids after a few months.

Anyway, Lilith is off having fun at the tennis courts when she gets a call from her sitter. Since there are no courts in her town, she drives the 60+ minutes back home in a hurry, and all because her sitter says that her kid has diaper rash. No, not diaper rash! Lilith quickly explains to her friend that her daughter never, ever gets diaper rash. She's so traumatized that she doesn't even want to go for a cup of coffee; she just wants to get her kid home asap.

Cut to a few weeks later and her sitter calls her at the courts again. Lilith starts getting suspicious, and she notices another woman who used the same sitter. Lilith confronts her, which leads to random woman admitting that her kid told her some disturbing things about what happened there. She decided to take her own kid out without warning any other parents about the stories.

Lilith meets some other parents and they discover that the sitter molested their kids. Enter Laurie and Joseph Braga, a married couple who work with kids. BTW, these two are totally real people who worked on a number of child abuse cases. Laurie can “talk” to kids, even infants by posing questions in the right way and working with them. One of the prosecutors agrees to work with her. He gives a classic TV movie line, saying, “you teach me how to talk to kids, and I'll teach you the law.”

It turns out that the sitter's boyfriend is a convicted pedophile. His parole officer let him stay with her because they promised he wouldn't interact with the children. You can see how well that worked. He says he didn't do anything and lame girlfriend sides with him. She finally admits that she left him alone with the kids and once, she even saw him with a naked boy in the bedroom.

This is based on the true story of the 80's Miami`s Country Walk Day Care Center child abuse, but I literally didn't know that until I started reading about it. The movie makes it seem like this was just a few kids abused by one woman and her husband/boyfriend.

It's actually one of those gross cases where you don't want to know the details. “Unspeakable Acts” glosses over most of those moments, except for a few scenes where one of the young boys admits that the couple made him have sex with some of the babies. I wish I could make fun of this one, but except for the fact that it doesn't hold up well in terms of clothing/sets/props, it's still a pretty good TV movie.