Amber Tamblyn delivers a revelatory performance in writer-director Hilary Brougher's follow-up to her promising debut, THE STICKY FINGERS OF TIME (1997). It's a provocative conversation-starter on several levels, but remains throughout a smart and sensitive treatment of a potentially lurid subject.
As her classmates take to the slopes on their eagerly awaited school ski trip, 16-year-old Stephanie Daley (Tamblyn) stumbles out of the lodge and across the snow trailing blood. She's just given birth in the ladies' room — a shocking disclosure, considering no one, not even Stephanie's parents (Melissa Leo, Jim Gaffigan) or best friend (Halley Feiffer), knew she was pregnant — but it's not until later that the 26-week-old fetus is found, dead. Immediately dubbed "The Ski Mom" by the tabloid press and now facing murder charges, Stephanie claims she herself had no idea she was pregnant: The only time she had sex was at a party with an older boy (Kel O'Neill) who never even ejaculated, and she insists she thought the cessation of her period was only due to dieting. Forensic psychologist Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton) is hired by the prosecution to evaluate Stephanie for an upcoming competency hearing, but Lydie's involvement in the case is complicated by the fact that she's about to give birth for the second time in a year; her previous pregnancy ended in a traumatic stillbirth that Lydie's husband, Paul (Timothy Hutton), feels she never properly mourned. With her camera trained on Stephanie's face, Lydie asks her young subject a series of questions about the events leading up to that fateful ski trip, and Stephanie's answers (dramatized in a series of flashbacks) reveal a quiet only child from a churchgoing family who plays flute in the school marching band and thinks abortion is wrong because, she tells Lydie, it would be like killing a baby. As Lydie attempts to determine the truth of what happened, she must also deal with her strained marriage and her own pregnancy, which she's begun to fear will once again end in tragedy.
As the drama unfolds, Brougher makes the parallels between Stephanie and Lydie explicit through repeated action and recurring symbols. But she needn't have worked so hard: Brougher wrote a series of compelling scenes that, while a bit top-heavy with ideas, add up to a bold, if deeply disquieting, depiction of pregnancy that dares question our culture's insistent myths about motherhood. And however you feel about her character and what she may or may not have done, Tamblyn's portrayal of Stephanie Daley is softly devastating. leave a comment --Ken Fox