TV REVIEW : A Look at Rights of Children

Sarah Jessica Parker, the waifish free spirit in “L.A. Story,” gets top billing in NBC’s affecting movie “In the Best Interests of the Children” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39), but she’s soundly upstaged by one of her co-stars: gifted child actor Lexi Randall.

Parker turns in a respectable performance as Callie, an abusive, mentally ill woman who wants to regain custody of her five children after hospitalization and therapy. But pint-sized Randall (“Sarah, Plain and Tall”), under Michael Ray Rhodes’ sensitive direction, makes the movie her own as Callie’s oldest daughter, Jessie, who wants to stay in foster care.

Randall, ably backed by Jessica Campbell and Lacey Guyon as two of the sisters, is utterly convincing as the abused child trying to create normalcy out of chaos. Jessie gives her younger siblings the only parenting they know, in the face of her mother’s neglect, promiscuity, violent boyfriends and frightening bouts of irrationality.

When loving foster parents envelop the children in clean warmth and security, Jessie, with the help of a salty lawyer (Elizabeth Ashley) and a sympathetic press, fights to stay with them.

The effective script by Peter Nelson and Jud Kinberg is based on a true case in Iowa that, we’re told, was a catalyst for stronger children’s rights in the state’s foster care system. It’s a disturbing view of a “we know what’s best” bureaucracy in a single-minded drive to reunite families, dismissing the feelings of the children it is supposed to protect.