Convicted: A Mother's Story (1987) Reviews

• Caged Jillian

  petershelleyau2002-12-17

  Ann Jillian is Elizabeth Billy Nickerson, a California taxi company cashier who steals $10,000 for her swindler boyfriend Van (Kiel Martin) and is imprisoned for 3 years for felony grand theft. Elizabeth's time in prison is relatively free of incident, though she must contend with the lesbian advances of Angie (Jenny Gago), but she faces the prospect of her son Matthew (Fred Savage) being adopted by a foster couple after he runs away from the home of Elizabeth's sister Janis (Gloria Loring) where Elizabeth's other child Tiffany (Christa Denton) is more content. Jillian is likeable and touching, wearing oversized shapeless clothes in prison. When she is arrested she is shot in closeup but her focus is on her children's reaction, she provides an amusingly blank response to the lesbian advance, and produces tears for her plea at the adoption hearing. The teleplay by Ellen Kessend, Katherine Spector and Elizabeth Gill makes Elizabeth's belief in Van both optimistic and naive, where she is told `I betcha he aint sitting around staring at your picture, wherever he is'. When she is asked how prison is, where she is referred to as a "punk", she replies `Not as bad as the movies'. The treatment has Elizabeth so afraid of `borrowing' money from her company that she accidently sets off an alarm, before she even gets to the safe, and in prison is given a smirking male counsellor who conceals information from her but at least doesn't sexually harass her. Her plea at the adoption hearing includes `Nobody's trying to take them away from me because I took them away from myself', and to Van's `Nobody ever loved me like you did' in the attempt at reconciliation, she replies `And nobody should have'. Although Angie isn't the only prison lesbian, she contextualises her behaviour by telling Elizabeth that she is only a lesbian in prison A rejected advance has no violent retribution, though Angie's cellmate does attack Elizabeth out of jealousy. Director Richard Heffron uses an obvious stuntwoman for Jillian when Elizabeth is attacked, Tina Turner's Typical Male at an all female dance, Anita Baker's Real Love when Tiffany is nearly raped at a party, and has Eliabeth's prison door slammed in her face after she turns around in response to seeing it for the first time.

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