Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 18, 1995 TAG: 9503230007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In most cases, issue movies simplify problems - and their solutions - and the characters become mouthpieces for one side or another of a debate.
Worst of all, audiences walk away with heightened emotions and not necessarily heightened understanding of the issue.
"Losing Isaiah" commits none of these sins and marshals all of its considerable artistic merits - exceptional performances, a fine script and very solid directing - to present a complicated issue with intelligence and sensitivity.
The story is set in Chicago, where a crack-addicted mother (Halle Berry) is nursing her newborn in a filthy corner of a burned-out building. Khaila (Berry) goes out in search of more drugs and puts her crying son in a box near a dumpster, carefully puts a lid on the box - smiling down on her baby - and wanders off. Within the context of the world she's living in, the act does not seem completely insane, and it sets the tone for much of the film - which is not forgiving, necessarily, but insightful.
When Khaila wakes up the next morning somewhere else, she realizes her son is not with her and flies out into the street to find him. What she discovers is that the trash men have come, and police tape marks the spot where she left her son, who, a bystander tells her, is dead.
The baby is taken to Cook County Hospital, where Margaret Lewin (Jessica Lange) works as a social worker. Margaret spends as much time as she can with the baby and eventually decides to bring him home. The movie needed one more scene to flesh out how this "hardened" social worker - a veteran of 15 years - comes to such a momentous decision so quickly, but this is a quibble.
Isaiah joins the Lewins - Charlie (David Strathairn), an architect, and daughter Hannah (Daisy Eagan) - and the family begins the struggle to overcome his problems, which are typical for a crack baby.
In what seems like another world, Khaila has completed a rehab program and is learning to read when a passage in a book prompts her to confess to her counselor about Isaiah, the son she "killed". The counselor Gussie (Regina Taylor) decides to look into what happened to Khaila's baby and discovers that the boy was adopted by a white couple - the Lewins.
Khaila decides she wants her child back. Samuel Jackson plays the lawyer who takes her case, and his character is alone in lacking full dimensionality. He sees Khaila as an issue, and Isaiah is no more human to him than a piece of evidence. I'm sure there are lawyers like Mr. Lewis, but in this movie - which avoids stereotypes - he is a disappointment.
The legal battle unfolds, and although we ought to know what's going to happen, this movie manages to create the illusion of spontaneity. It's part editing, part direction and three parts Jessica Lange.
Almost everyone is good. Berry proves herself in this movie - as if she needs to after "Jungle Fever" - to be a whole lot more than a pretty face. But Lange, thank heavens, offers solid evidence that she's willing to be middle-aged and that the territory she's in is by no means a no-woman's-land, artistically. Her Margaret is tough, tired and hurt, and every bit of that is brilliantly conveyed in every scene.
Best of all, "Losing Isaiah" leaves you with a reasonable hope - without moralizing - that between human beings who are actually talking and listening to each other, no problem is unsolvable and no sin too enormous to forgive. And in these hard-hearted times, that's a pretty important message.
Losing Isaiah
***
Rated R for language and adult situations, 1 hour and 48 minutes, a Paramount Pictures release, showing at Salem Valley 8.
by CNB