 Stephanie
Daley, a new film and multiple festival award winner released on DVD
September 4, is the sensitive drama of 16-year-old Stephanie Daley
(Amber Tamblyn, Joan of Arcadia), who becomes pregnant and is
accused of murdering her newborn baby.
Daley denies knowing she was pregnant and is placed in psychiatric
counseling with Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton, The Chronicles of Narnia)
who is herself pregnant and has issues of her own to come to terms
with including her husband Paul (award-winning actor Timothy
Hutton).
The main question here is do we believe Daley? It is easy to
overlook the naivety of youth as we factor in the community
at-large, parental influences, religious beliefs, and fear of
persecution. Still . . . we wonder, did she do it?
The portrayal of the teenaged culture is perhaps the best aspect of
this film, giving everyone a reminder of those confusing and trying
times. Sending a clear message, the script may be a tad toned down
in places (though it carries an R rating) but that is a good thing
because it is a message that every teen and parent should hear and
one should not have to be able to interpret Thoreau in order to
garner it’s message. Although if you want to dig deeper, it’s there.
A Thoreau quote, “I went to the woods to live deliberately . . .,”
on the high school English professor’s blackboard may have been a
connection to a nightmarish dream Crane had of remaining in the
woods alone to have her baby. Daley winds up having her baby alone
in a primitive manner, while we later learn that Crane on an
emotional whim, emptied the ashes of her own previously stillborn
child into the woods from the window of a moving vehicle. Crane may
have felt the unconscious dream-need to return to the woods for
birth to exonerate herself from her action, thereby giving the film
more than just surface value.
Regardless of how it’s interpreted, it is ultimately the story of
two women: one having a baby at the earliest point in life and one
having a baby at the latest point in life and the relationship that
bonds between them allowing each to face the necessary truths in
their lives. And as my own 16-year-old daughter said, “It was the
ending that got me.”
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