Word: bellon
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...East Coast, was not suitable for Jamie, but it saved the life of an older transplant patient at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. The second organ came from a ten-month-old boy killed in a car-train collision in Utah. His father, Laird Bellon, had seen Fiske on television and specified that his son's liver should go to Jamie...
...addition, doctors at Pittsburgh were already busy with a liver transplant and could not handle a second one. "If another child had been in greater need, we would have had a dilemma," says Jamie's surgeon, Dr. John Najarian. "I would have felt compelled to call the Bellon family and say, 'We have a child who needs it more.' But if the donor still wants to designate a recipient, that's that. His choice is final...
Unfortunately Bellon vitiates the intensity by allowing the rest of her film to deteriorate into a series of rigid and predictable scenes: the deeply wounded victim refusing at first to bring charges; her boyfriend reacting with outrage but with a lack of true understanding; the community half suspecting that the victim may have done something to provoke the crime; the rapists, when they are finally brought to trial, insisting that they were indeed enticed into their act; the woman, supported only by a friend, forced to relive the most ghastly moments of her life in testimony and in re-enactment...
...Bellon even runs in a number of scenes in which traditional female stereotyping is imposed on young girls. One is put down for wanting to be a railroad engineer when she grows up, another not permitted to be a bank robber in a cops-and-robbers game, but told by the little boys that she must be the teller-victim. Children's drawings show women as housewives, while men are portrayed as the movers and shakers of the world...
Despite a delicate performance throughout by Nell, despite the fine quality of Bellon's work at the technical level, the film is finally smothered under the weight of these feminist bromides. One leaves wondering if, in fact, there is any thing original or illuminating left to say about the causes and consequences of rape, whether it is now possible to go be yond talk-show rhetoric. It seems ironic that all one can honestly praise in this movie is its powerful depiction of the crime itself rather than its insights into a world where rape is a tragic commonplace...