Customer Reviews

Stephanie Daley

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Captivating and hypnotic portrayals by Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn

Magnetic acting by Timothy Hutton, Denis O'Hare, and Melissa Leo, who receive excrutiatingly minimal screen time portraying crucial characters

Spellbinding cinematography and imagery and allusions

Painstakingly realistic situations, events, conversations, human interactions

A film about how people interact and communicate with each other in difficult situations that will change their lives forever...how missed opportunities of communication permanently transform the lives of people...how treasured events in women's lives - loss of virginity and pregnancy - are seemingly always subverted and mistreated and degraded by lack of clear communication...

This is a true gem of a movie that has tremendous depth, exploring sensitive topics like teen sex, teen pregnancy,its repercussions and fears that accompany women through marriage & motherhood. The subject matter is controversial but in the hands of capable writer-director Hilary Brougher, the story is told with clarity, poignancy and sensitivity.


The story centers around Stephanie Daley, a 16 year old teenager who is accused of murdering her newborn infant daughter whilst on a school ski trip. The role is played to perfection by Amber Tamblyn, and her portrayal of a shy adolescent trying to find a social niche at school is at times hard to watch, though played with a high level of credibility. The flashbacks of Stephanie recalling the past, especially the public restroom scene of the birth itself is something one will not soon forget, and Amber Tamblyn portrays the teen's pain, horror and shame to chilling effect.

The other main role, that of forensic psychologist Lydia Crane is played by Tilda Swinton. Lydia herself is five months pregnant, and beset with doubts about her impending motherhood [having suffered a stillbirth a year ago] and also the strains on her emotionally fragile marriage [husband is played by Timothy Hutton]. Lydia's job is to evaluate Stephanie's mental capacity before a competency hearing. Swinton is well-cast as the emotionally fragile Crane, but ultimately her problems do not seem to be as serious as the ones facing young Stephanie. It is indeed to Tamblyn's credit that she makes the viewer care so much more about Stephanie and wanting to see how she comes out of the crisis. Throughout Stephanie's sessions with Crane, and especially in the flashbacks, one feels a strong sense of sympathy for the fragile teen who seems lost and frightened, and increasingly isolated.

All in all, Stephanie Daley is a compelling human drama that portrays a sensitive topic with unflinching and painful honesty. Highly recommended!

***1/2

In "Stephanie Daley," Tilda Swinton stars as Lydie Crane, a forensic psychologist in her final months of pregnancy. Despite her condition and the fact that she had a miscarriage less than a year earlier, Lydie agrees to take on the case of a teenaged girl named Stephanie Daley (Amber Tamblyn) who is accused of killing her newborn at childbirth.

Written and directed by Hilary Brougher, "Stephanie Daley" is a human drama wrapped inside a legal whodunit (it's sort of like "Agnes Of God" minus the nuns' habits and beatific visions). Set in scenic Upstate New York, the movie explores the anxieties and fears that many women face before, during and after pregnancy. Lydie's situation very much parallels Stephanie's at times, resulting in a strange symbiotic relationship between the two women. Those parallels aren't always as clearly drawn as they might be, but the positive result is that the story is made less obvious and more intriguing by the ambiguity.

"Stephanie Daley" is a low-keyed, thoughtful work that doesn't go in for flashy melodrama or thematic overstatement. It allows its narrative to unfold slowly, finding much of its drama in the minutiae of everyday life in the small town in which it is set.

The movie is blessed with sensitive, subtle work from not only Swinton and Tamblyn but a large cast of secondary performers, including Timothy Hutton, Kel O'Neill, Denis O'Hare, and others. The relationships in the movie are intricate and complex, and the plot doesn't seek out a preset path or formula to follow. It's not a movie designed to appeal to mainstream audiences much, but for those who prefer their films to wander a bit off the well-beaten path, "Stephanie Daley" offers substantial rewards.

Superb acting and unusually realistic portrayals of high school life don't save this movie from its slow pace, artificially contrived premise, and unresolved ambiguities that leave the viewer dangling.

Tilda Swanton plays Lydie Crane, a pregnant forensic psychologist who is still reeling from a stillborn birth just months earlier. Amber Tamblyn, the star of TV's quirky "Joan of Arcadia," plays Stephanie Daley, a confused Christian girl who has somehow lost an accidental pregnancy. Did she murder the premature fetus, or was it born dead? The prosecutor hires Crane to find out.

As a forensic psychologist, I was looking forward to seeing this movie. Instead, I found it hopelessly confused and confusing. The distinctions between the legal concepts of competency (the current ability to comphrehend one's situation and stand trial) and sanity (a past mental state pertaining to the time of an offense) are muddied. Far more troublingly, filmmaker Hilary Braugher confuses moral and legal guilt. One is not legally guilty of killing a baby for merely wishing it dead! And most troubling of all, Crane foists her own ambivalent psychological state onto this confused teenage girl, essentially using her empathetic interviewing skills to collude in the girl's exploitation. In real life (which I realize doesn't have much connection to the movies) Crane's violations of her professional role boundaries would be unethical; Crane probably should have declined a case with so many troubling parallels to her own circumstances.

The movie tackles complex issues about religion, fate versus choice, and women's fear of giving birth. And it has a superficial allure of feminism in its focus on the female experience. But in the end, its message is far from empowering. Should a teen girl really [SPOILER ALERT - DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE AND WANT TO MAINTAIN THE SUSPENSE] go to prison for five years for mere bad thoughts? I breathed a sigh of relief that there aren't too many real-life Lydie Cranes running around to assist such judicial railroads. Also, that I'd seen my last dead deer for awhile.

Writer/Director Hilary Brougher has created a deeply involving and moving masterwork of film with her little independent low budget STEPHANIE DALEY. Brougher has courage to address an issue most people wish to submerge - that of unwanted teenage pregnancies and their consequences - and she does it in the form of a story that is so well woven and presented with such fine actors that she not only succeeds in bringing attention to her main topic, she also introduces us to two women whose lives, though separated by years of age, are significantly parallel. The result is a film that lingers in the mind long after the closing credits.

Stephanie Daley (Amber Tamblyn) is a 16-year-old girl, shy, introverted and on the periphery of the social scene at high school until she meets a boy with whom she has consensual sex. The focus of her life changes as she grows in girth and at one dramatic point she gives birth to a fetus inside a bathroom stall which she secretly discards: no one knows Stephanie's secret. When she is examined, she is told she was pregnant, a fact which she denies. A forensic psychologist Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton), pregnant herself, is brought into the case to examine Stephanie and help the court decide the truth about what happened. As Stephanie opens up to Lydie, Lydie begins to acknowledge her own conflicts about her current pregnancy with her husband Paul (Timothy Hutton): their first pregnancy resulted in a stillbirth and the current pregnancy began three months after that unresolved tragedy. When Lydie is not at her job she faces a world of people including a friend Frank (Denis O'Hare) who make her consider her own concepts of right and wrong. Lydie and Stephanie work together on the concept that 'the truth is what we believe'. How these two women reach the conclusions they do is the part of the story that is best left unshared until the viewer experiences it alone.

The cast is so fine that to single out one would be a disservice to the ensemble effect director Brougher has achieved. Tilda Swinton continues to finesse her extraordinary gifts as an actress and the young Amber Tamblyn makes a significant stride for her career. There is a small role for fine character actress Novella Nelson as Doctor Lynn that is a remarkable achievement. This is a film with a tough subject matter, handled with the utmost dignity, and makes a social statement while glowing as a superb independent film. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, September 07

Short reveiw on a good movie - I don't want to spoil it.

Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton)is a psychologist who interviews Stephanie Daley (Amber Tamblyn) about the incident that happened on a school skiing trip, for the court side of the case. Stephanie is accused of murdering her newborn child.

-Stephanie collapses with blood at her feet while skiing.
She didn't know she was pregnant.
-Lydie Crane wants to keep her marriage alive and have a baby. Lydie recently had a still born.

The interweaving of the lives of these two individuals as they look through their past, their present and hopes for the future is done very well. This is a very well acted, deep thought movie.

4 stars

a sad movie that has an extraordinary scene of a young woman giving birth alone in a bathroom stall.
I've seen my wife deliver our kids, yet the impact of this scene comes close to emotional wallop those births gave me.



The plot is two women's intertwining lives and how they react and what they feel about being pregnant and giving birth to another human being.
The young women is in denial that she hide her pregnancy and killed the newborn daughter. The older women is her court psychologist-interogator, looking to see if she is fit to stand trial.
Her pregnancy is problematic, her emotional rollercoaster with both the possibility of another miscarriage/stillbirth and the interaction with the younger women pushes her to her limits.

The story is about limits. What is acceptable behavior, what does society expect of it's young women, and what emotional upheavals pregnancy and a new life can be.
How far can she go before she breaks and desires the death of what she has given life to.

It is well played, well designed plot, understated for the most part, with the scene in the bathroom it's climax.
As an aside, it was nice, for once, to see the male get entangled with the legal system with a charge of statutory rape. All too often, unplanned teenaged pregnancies are the sole domain of the female and her family. I think that the way the movie protrays the circle of people effected by both children is one of it's strongest points. The are a few cute jabs, one at abstinance only sex education, and one at female clergy, and perhaps one about deer that i didn't get.

worth a evening's watch, although some may want to fastforward past the bathroom birth scene. It will probably haunt mothers who have been through the experience and can not imagine being 17 and doing it all alone. Human beings are not meant to give birth alone and it is an excriciatingly painful scene.

The 16-year-old title character of the film Stephanie Daley (played by Amber Tamblyn) gave birth to a child on a school ski trip, disposing of the premature infant's body in the ski resort restroom. Coldly dubbed the "Ski Mom" by the local media, Stephanie is charged with murdering her own baby immediately following childbirth. Incredibly, Stephanie claims that she did not know she was pregnant, and that her child was stillborn. Forensic psychologist Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton in a mesmerizing performance) is assigned to determine Stephanie's mental condition and root out the truth behind the incident.

Swinton's character recently experienced a stillbirth, and she is expecting again. The film probes the lives of these two women, both of whom have domestic turmoil (a hard-hearted father for Stephanie, an emotionally distant husband for Swinton), revealing that media coverage of headline-grabbing crimes rarely scratches the surface of the true issues at hand. Stephanie attends a school with abstinence-only curriculum, has an offensively abrasive male teacher, and lives in quiet isolation from her overbearing, insecure father and retrained mother. What options does a girl in that situation have when she becomes unintentionally pregnant after her first, furtive sexual encounter? As we view flashbacks into the lives of both Stephanie and psychologist Lydie, the viewer discovers that even Lydie struggled with the proper disposal and memorial for her stillborn child.

Screenwriter Hilary Brougher has crafted an austere storyline that is hauntingly true-to-life, with no neat conclusion in the last ten minutes of screentime. The viewer is left with the same questions Lydie and Stephanie struggle with. Whose fault was it that Lydie miscarried her first child, and that her marriage has never recovered? Whose fault was it that a teenager got pregnant and chose denial over confronting her mistakes?

For most women, motherhood is supposed to be a happy time in their lives. But this film tackles some very important issues about women, motherhood, marriage and pre-marital teenage sex. We meet Stephanie Daley, 16 year old girl who has one night stand at the party with the boy she barely knows. She is either in denial or totally ignorant about her developing pregnancy when one day during her ski trip she delivers premature baby at the public restroom. Baby ends up dead and the police and legal team needs to determine if this young mother premeditated baby's murder. Incidentally, the psychologist assigned to this case is pregnant herself. It is her second pregnancy after her first one resulted in a birth of a stillborn baby. This woman's own anxieties about her own marriage and pregnancy seem to overlap with the case she is handling. Tilda Swinton delivers great portrayal of a woman trying to keep her personal and professional life together while handling one of the most important cases of her career.

I suppose women will enjoy this more than men. I winced during the birth scenes, but have to admit they are well acted. The plot seems to concern the ambiguities and moral dilemmas we face and the choices we make, which don't always add up for all concerned. A serious movie, but is it entertainment? You decide.