Watched: 05/27/2025
Format: YouTube TV on demand
Viewing: First
Director: Steven Robman
This movie is about a young woman (Chabert, playing a college junior here) with a rocky relationship with her father, who has remarried and has a young daughter (Samantha Hanratty). When her father and her step-mother die in a car accident, she learns that her father named her custodian of her half-sister.
While attending college, she moves into her father's house and tries to take care of a seven-year-old. As it turns out, for a hard-partying college girl, this is a change of pace.
Wendie Malick plays Chabert's mother, a woman who also seems like a lot of fun, but who maybe was not a role model for structured parenting, and is more excited to have an adult-aged college daughter she can hang with than she was to raise a young child.
The movie follows predictable beats, and you could probably figure out the arc just from the prompt. This was, after all, and ABC Family movie from an era I actually kind of remember where they acknowledged things like "regular people have sex and have messy lives".
Thus, Chabert has a completely inappropriate relationship with her Romantic Literature instructor which does not get commented upon, and is trying to go to Italy with him when he goes for his research trip, but now she's got this kid.
The kid, by the way, is actually a really good actor. She's now Teen Misty on Yellowjackets. And the attorney is David Ramsey, who I knew from several CW DC Comics shows as John Diggle.
For what it is, it's a pretty good movie about how you can grow into something that's absolutely worthwhile, but there are going to be growing pains. And if you are a young adult with plans to continue on your path of enjoying being a responsibility-free young adult, you're going to make some hard decisions.
Is it stupid?
No! It's formulaic, and I don't buy someone is leaving a 7-year-old with a 21-year-old that they *also* wish would attend law school, as Chabert's father has done. And hopefully they wouldn't have done this without a carefully constructed plan with buy in from everyone - but death is not something even attorneys prepare for very well. The topic sounds like a bummer, but it's actually kind of a funny movie, and everyone understands the assignment.
Honestly, this could have been an interesting backdoor pilot, but was maybe too close to the plot of Party of Five had they tried that.
I dunno. It was fine. Chabert holds her own through the whole movie and carries it off as a solid lead. She manages to be a self-centered 21-year-old without seeming completely off-putting, and her change of heart feels buyable, which is not easy in a movie this by-the-numbers.
But it is wild to see a TV family movie where a co-ed is waking up from a night of sex with her instructor. Man, 20 years ago was a different world.
It does not hurt that Chabert had reached full fox status
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