TV Reviews : ‘I Love You’ Is a Potent Adoption Story
A strong adoption story can jar our sense of who we are and, on a broader level, shake up our preconception that blood is always thicker than water. Those potent themes are dramatized in a mesmerizing tale of a 16-year-old boy’s self-discovery in “Always Remember I Love You” (Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8).
Fewer things in life can be more shattering than discovering that your parents are not your real parents. Writer Vivienne Radkoff’s script has turned this trauma into a rigorous, unpredictable story that builds to a stunning conclusion in front of a family tree on Christmas morning. Keep a box of Kleenex handy. The fade-out on the tearful Patty Duke, who plays the alienated youth’s real mother, is a powerful and blissful moment.
This is a discerning, ambitious network movie that touches the same child-selling issues as the hit stage play “Baby Dance,” which touched a big nerve at the Pasadena Playhouse earlier this year. Director Michael Miller, despite the loaded gun of a crooked lawyer and a runaway adolescent seeking his genetic parents, never lets the production succumb to melodrama or cheap sentiment. That’s an accomplishment in a story like this.
Imaginative flashbacks, in a soft-focus motif, dramatize the theft of the adopted boy as he was plucked out of his front yard as a 2-year-old. Now the deception of his protective, well-meaning adopted parents, who thought they had bought the baby legally, has come home to roost.
The confused but likable teen-age protagonist is an affectionate rather than histrionic portrait by Stephen Dorff. In reality, his character is unbelievably self-contained and outwardly calm, but it’s a performance of such sweet ingenuity that you are swept up in it.
There are no villains here and no cliches. Airing the day before Christmas Eve, it’s really a Christmas carol, if you want to know the truth.
The complete guide to home viewing
Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyone’s talking about.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.