“Down Will Come Baby”
Tomorrow at 9 on WCBS/Ch.2
“DOWN Will Come Baby” is a sort of family-style “Fatal Attraction” that is so fatally flawed it is virtually brain dead on arrival.
For one thing, Meredith Baxter has so effectively typecast herself as homicidal wacko Betty Broderick that she should never be allowed to play a mother we’re supposed to root for in the end.
For another, Diana Scarwid, as creepy Dorothy, is unable to make us forget that she played the abused daughter of Joan Crawford in one of the camp classics of all movie time.
So we keep thinking, well, of course, she’s grown into “Mommie Dearest.”
But the biggest problem “Baby” has is timing.
Just two weeks after the massacre in Columbine High School, begging the question of how parents could have been so oblivious to signs of trouble is not the time to attempt to “entertain” with the story of a 12-year-old in peril because her parents are preoccupied with their own lives.
Leah Garr (Baxter) is fixated on moving up a few tax brackets.
She comes in from her traveling sales job only long enough to fight with her husband Marcus (Tom Amandes) about everything from money to how their daughter Robin (Evan Rachel Wood) will spend her summer.
In quiet desperation, Robin chooses to go to sleepaway camp, where she befriends the sad Amelia (Katie Booze-Mooney), whose clear signs of physical abuse have somehow managed to escape the eye of any and all adults.
Amelia drowns during a midnight swim with Robin.
Robin feels guilty.
Pop, who has the look but not the charisma of a beefy Jimmy Stewart, doesn’t put in any less hours at his office.
Mom not only doesn’t give up the road, but she takes a bigger job in Denver, 800 miles away from her hubby and daughter.
Despite their heroics at the end, Robin’s parents are not grown-up heroes. Only childish adults who to the bitter end do not seem to comprehend the consequences of their actions.