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thank you so much to PatR00 for this request on Reactr! this story was so complex and intriguing - I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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Joseph Olson

I almost forgot about this movie. I saw it many years ago, and I remember thinking it was outstanding and very thought provoking. I remembered the movie once I saw your post, and it made me wonder why I hadn’t thought about it in a very long time. There seems to be something about Casey Affleck vehicles that both impress me with how good they are and for some reason don’t come to mind much afterwards. Manchester by the Sea is another excellent movie starring Casey Affleck that I remember even less than I did this one. Of course the complicated central question of this movie is do you return a child to a negligent mother? The little girl should have been removed from her mother’s care. It was obviously an unsafe and unhealthy environment. She shouldn’t have been kidnapped, but I understand why they did it. Put the little girl into the Social Service and foster care system, and it’s a roll of the dice whether she’ll be placed somewhere where she’ll be loved. I had to deal with that in a way over 25 years ago when I had to go through a year and a half custody battle after my daughter was removed from her mother’s care. It’s a long story that I won’t go into in much detail, but I was driving 600 mile round trips multiple times per month for court hearings and visitations. I lived in a different state, which complicated the process enormously. It’s hard enough to deal with one state bureaucracy, but get two states involved and it becomes exponentially worse. During that time, my daughter was placed with a couple who badly mistreated her (relatives of her mother). So I know a lot about what it’s like to have to return a child to an environment where they’re being abused. It took a lot to get her out of there. Just telling a social worker a child is being mistreated doesn’t force them to act with any sense of urgency. I did win custody in the end, but the process was a nightmare. Luckily my daughter was young enough that she doesn’t remember much about what she went through (she was about the same age as the little girl in this movie when it all started), but I remember. Maybe that’s why I didn’t remember this movie. Maybe I wanted to forget it.

Blind Entertainment

Never heard of this movie, or the book itself based on, but I absolutely love it! I grew up with my parents doing foster care, and a good amount of kids they took in came from situations like Amanda. Of course kidnapping is bad, but seeing these types of situations firsthand you can kind of understand Doyle’s point of view. The sad fact is a lot of these kids are returned to their original situation, and like Doyle said it just becomes a generational cycle. I’ve seen it firsthand, and it’s heartbreaking, I work in social work, and in this type of field when working with kids I’ve seen the symptom fail kids like Amanda way too many times. In reality the movie would end with Amanda in foster care, and most likely an investigation into her living situation.