Watched: 05/07/2025
Format: Peacock
Viewing: First
Director: Demetrius Navarro
This journey through the career of Lacey Chabert (just live action work, and only movie-length material - we have to contain this somehow) has become a study of the work of someone who is truly a working actor.
Sure, Chabert is a star. Even if she'd never been in anything after Lost in Space, I'd remember her as a young actor. If Mean Girls had been her last role, we'd all definitely still know her. But Chabert started in movies as a child (and we'll get to that), and her current role as the face of Hallmark and Christmas movies was not a foregone conclusion. She had a lot of work that was clearly putting food on the table, and that's kind of what we've been watching for a bit.
And so we find a movie here from 2013 in which she barely appears. It's one of six films she had released in 2013, and one of ten projects - as she voiced cartoons and video games (she's the default voice for Zatanna at DC Entertainment). But I'm betting she was in and out of Detroit - where this movie seems to have been filmed - in about three days.
This movie is very independent, very well intentioned, and very much not my thing. It is also less about Chabert's character, who book-ends the film, and a vehicle for real world child prodigy of the piano, Ethan Bortnick.* Based on the age of the child star and editing timelines, I am guessing it was filmed in 2011, and finally found distribution in 2013.
It's a feel good movie about a boy whose mother (Chabert) is a soldier who goes missing while working in tsunami relief in Japan. (I know! Chabert as a soldier!) She's married to Mean Girls co-star Jonathan Bennett who is not her son's father - which the kid learns when, for reasons I cannot begin to guess, CPS shows up and tries to take him away since Bennett's name is not on the official paperwork. Because in this movie CPS doesn't have enough to do in a major metropolitan city.
Hearing he's going to be put in an institution, our kid peaces out and decides being a hobo is preferential, taking along his toy keyboard. He meets a former soldier who redirects him to go mooch off a rich family.
Eventually Bortnick winds up in an orphanage that has no funds, and plays a concert that saves the orphanage. And then Chabert returns.
That is the barest of outlines, but that's sorta what happens.
I'll be honest with you guys - this was a hard watch. Bortnick is a kid, and he doesn't act so much as he says lines given to him, and he never looks like he wants to be there. Among the talent assembled, Bennett and Chabert are Olivier and Vivienne Leigh. There's an aggressively cheerful soundtrack populated by what sounds like Christian pop and songs by Bortnick - making me understand how this film got packaged as they definitely tried to sell the soundtrack. The pacing is atrocious. And, of course, the plot is as amorphous, sickly sweet and insubstantial as cotton candy.
I found myself skipping over scenes of the kid, like, wandering around in empty houses, just to move it along. That is not how I watch movies. Here, it became a survival mechanism.
Is it stupid?
No. But clearly this is a movie for other people, like Grandmas who like kids playing classical music and being kind, and it might be good to show less-talented kids in order to gently inform them that they will never be the best at anything.
The movie's not good, but I wasn't on the "this is moronic" side of the fence. But it's kind of sitting on that fence, pondering its options.
Chabert is fine in her five minutes of screentime. Even if the movie puts her in a sling at the end, and she uses the arm in the exact same scene.
Would Chabert make a good soldier? I mean - the jury is out, but I would love to see her going Full Metal Jacket.
As folks tracking the final years of Bruce Willis' career know, there is a whole industry out there of inexpensively produced films that hire actors to show up for a few days on a much longer movie so those actors get paid to basically wind up on the poster, which is done to legitimize the movie. Apparently what this movie could afford was a couple of days of Chabert and slightly more of Bennett. And that's essentially what this is. Two kinda familiar faces to surround a child prodigy on a poster and someone trying to do some media synergy around the kid.
*To be clear, Bortnick is legit and was apparently an actual phenom as a kid. He's still out there, and is wrapping a tour right now.
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