There are worse tales of maternal vigilantism than Meredith Baxter’s A Mother’s Justice: John Schlesinger’s notorious Eye for an Eye, starring Sally Field, springs immediately to mind. But don’t take that as an endorsement of Baxter’s film, which premiered on NBC in 1991 and found a second home on Lifetime. It’s still quite bad, just not as grotesque as Field’s revenge fantasy. The closest it comes is a misguided scene at an Italian restaurant that brings new meaning to the slogan “When you’re here, you’re family.”
Justice, directed by Noel Nosseck (No One Would Tell), opens suspensefully, with a predator prowling the streets. His abduction of Debbie (Carrie Hamilton), a 23-year-old aspiring nurse, is more graphic than her subsequent rape, which she immediately reports to police. Det. Bogardus (Blu Mankuma) assures her it wasn’t her fault and awkwardly tells her “I know I’m the same color as the man who attacked you, but I just want you to know, we get ’em in all colors. Like I said, don’t worry. If he goes on, we’ll get him.”
“How long does he have to go on?” Debbie’s mother Lila (Baxter) demands, but she doesn’t know the half of it — their Pacific Northwest enclave is teeming with serial rapists that an overburdened, underfunded police department hasn’t prioritized catching. Her second husband, Joseph (G.W. Bailey of The Closer), is a cop himself, and in a contrived subplot provides full-time security at the same psychiatric hospital where Lila’s a nurse, proximity that allows them to function as unsanctioned partners when she decides, a la Death Wish, to take the law into her own hands.
“Oh, that bastard. He’s gonna be so sorry he touched my girl!” Lila yells after learning of Debbie’s assault, and true to her word she hatches a plan to serve as a decoy and lure the perpetrator herself. She seeks no input from her daughter, an alcoholic and habitual liar from whom she is often estranged, even as her obsession with justice deepens their divide. “You’ve got to get rid of the rage or it’s gonna eat you up,” a staff psychiatrist (Sheila Moore) counsels at work, noting that an arrest won’t change her fractious relationship with Debbie. Lila curtly replies “I don’t wanna get rid of it.”
When Baxter wasn’t being wronged by selfish husbands in TV movies, or mixed up in campy Egyptian mythology, she moonlit as a crusading mom: the similarly titled A Mother’s Fight for Justice, about drunk driving, aired a decade later. Here her performance is stifled by an uneven screenplay (credited to Someone I Touched scribe James S. Henerson) that raises troubling questions about Debbie’s take on Lila’s antics and dismisses them just as easily with an “OK, she was unhinged… but also heroic!” wave of the pen.
Though you’ll agree with Lila’s emotional outburst late in the film about police minimization of sexual violence — it’s Baxter’s best, most furious scene — you’re not entirely sure why she’s the focus of all this spectacle, and not Debbie or other women who shared the same prolific rapist. Hamilton, Carol Burnett’s late daughter, plays an equally vexing character who is just as stubborn as Lila, shading her with more complexity than the script provides.
Debbie’s friendship with Lois (the wonderful Madlyn Rhue), a social worker in a wheelchair who hires her as a caregiver, provides a welcome respite from family melodrama and leaves us to ponder how much more enjoyable A Mother’s Justice might’ve been if Lila was a bit more incisive and a little less capricious.
Streaming and DVD availability
A Mother’s Justice isn’t currently available on DVD or authorized streaming platforms, but there’s an old video transfer on YouTube. On IMDb you can also find exploitative cover art from an Australian VHS release that isn’t modeled on Hamilton and has little to do with the movie.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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