In the Best Interest of the Child Review – When Nobody Listens to the Child

Spoiler & Content Warning: This review contains major spoilers and discusses child sexual abuse allegations, disturbing behaviour in a young child and family court proceedings.

Sometimes the title of a film becomes increasingly ironic the longer you watch it.

That was certainly the case for me with In the Best Interest of the Child.

This 1990 made-for-television drama stars Meg Tilly as Jennifer Colton, a divorced mother whose five-year-old daughter Mandy begins displaying increasingly disturbing behaviour following visits with her father, Walt, played by Michael O’Keefe. Marta Woodward plays Mandy, while Ed Begley Jr. appears as Jennifer’s lawyer and cousin Howard Feldon.

It’s an upsetting film, but what made me particularly angry was watching a mother desperately trying to get people to listen to what her child was telling them—and continually running into a system seemingly more concerned with maintaining the father’s visitation than asking whether that visitation was actually safe.

Mandy Is Clearly in Distress

The changes in Mandy are impossible to ignore.

She suffers screaming nightmares. Her behaviour becomes increasingly violent and destructive. She has terrible tantrums, and eventually she begins telling her mother things that lead Jennifer to believe that her father is sexually abusing her. Contemporary descriptions of the film similarly highlighted Mandy’s nightmares, violent behaviour and disclosure that her father was hurting her.

Of course, in real life, disturbing behaviour or a child’s knowledge of sexual body parts cannot by itself prove that a particular person has committed sexual abuse. Allegations like these require extremely careful investigation.

But this is a film, and the filmmakers leave the audience with little doubt about what they want us to believe is happening to Mandy. Even a contemporary Los Angeles Times review observed that Walt’s guilt is essentially presented to the viewer as a foregone conclusion despite his denials.

That’s what makes watching the adults argue over standards of evidence so frustrating.

There is a terrified five-year-old child in the middle of all this.

At what point does protecting her from the possibility of further harm become more important than preserving an adult’s unsupervised visitation?

And Still She Has to Visit Her Father

This was probably what angered me most.

The court case itself doesn’t magically make Mandy safe.

Jennifer seeks to have Walt’s visitation stopped, but the court concludes that there isn’t sufficient proof and continues allowing him unsupervised access. When Jennifer refuses to comply, she is jailed for contempt.

So Jennifer is placed in an impossible position.

Obey the court and hand over the daughter she genuinely believes is being sexually abused.

Or protect her daughter and become the person breaking the law.

What kind of choice is that for a mother?

And within the story, the implication that the abuse is continuing after the allegations and court proceedings have already begun is beyond belief.

You’d hope that merely having such serious concerns raised would result in enormous caution while everybody established what was happening.

Instead, Mandy is still the one carrying the consequences.

Judge Dunham Infuriated Me

David Wohl plays Judge Dunham, and I found the character incredibly frustrating.

The judge has an enormously difficult responsibility, admittedly. A court cannot simply declare somebody a child abuser because an allegation has been made. A falsely accused parent and a genuinely abused child both need a system capable of establishing the truth.

But the way this fictional court responds to Jennifer and Mandy left me furious.

This isn’t a mother casually deciding that she doesn’t like her ex-husband seeing their daughter.

She’s watching her five-year-old child screaming at night, smashing things, experiencing frightening behavioural changes and making extremely disturbing disclosures.

Jennifer is begging people to listen.

And when the judge makes the point that he has children too, I found it incredibly hypocritical.

If anything, surely being a parent should make him understand Jennifer’s terror.

Instead, the power of the court is ultimately turned against her.

Who the F*** Was Acting in Mandy’s Best Interests?

That’s the question I kept coming back to.

The film is called In the Best Interest of the Child.

But who the f*** was actually acting in Mandy’s best interests?

Jennifer tries doctors.

She tries therapists.

She tries lawyers.

She goes through the courts.

She tries doing things the legal way.

Yet she cannot achieve the one thing she believes her daughter desperately needs: protection from unsupervised contact with Walt.

The system depicted in this film seems incapable of dealing with the possibility that waiting for incontrovertible proof could mean sending the child back into the very situation from which she needs protecting.

And Mandy doesn’t understand evidential thresholds or courtroom procedure.

She’s five.

She only knows what’s happening to her.

Meg Tilly Is Excellent

Meg Tilly is the strongest part of the film for me.

She doesn’t play Jennifer as some fearless action-movie mother who instantly knows what to do.

Jennifer is frightened, frustrated and increasingly desperate.

She wants the legal system to work.

That’s important.

She doesn’t immediately decide to ignore the courts and disappear with Mandy. She reaches that point because every legitimate avenue she tries appears to fail her daughter.

Tilly makes that progression believable.

Marta Woodward also deserves enormous credit as Mandy. She was actually nominated for a Young Artist Award for her performance.

For such a young actress, she’s being asked to portray extraordinarily difficult material, and Mandy’s distress is what gives the film much of its emotional impact.

Walt Made My Skin Crawl

Michael O’Keefe’s performance as Walt is effective partly because the character isn’t presented as an obvious movie monster.

And that’s unsettling.

He denies abusing Mandy.

But the film repeatedly leads its audience towards believing the child’s disclosures, and Jennifer becomes convinced that her daughter remains in danger.

I found the idea that a father could continue abusing his own child even after allegations had been raised and legal proceedings had begun particularly disturbing.

If anything, you’d imagine scrutiny would make somebody stop.

Yet the film presents Jennifer as confronting the horrifying possibility that nothing has changed.

A Mother Finally Decides Enough Is Enough

Eventually Jennifer reaches the conclusion that the legal system isn’t going to protect Mandy quickly enough.

So she does something drastic.

She arranges for Mandy to disappear into hiding.

Jennifer knows what this means.

She may lose her freedom.

She may be prosecuted.

And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, protecting Mandy means Jennifer herself cannot simply disappear into a happy new life with her daughter.

The ending confirms that Jennifer faces a felony kidnapping charge and refuses to tell Judge Dunham where Mandy is. Her explanation is devastatingly simple: she tried following the law, but Mandy couldn’t afford to wait for that law to change.

It’s not a happy ending.

Jennifer hasn’t defeated the system.

She hasn’t exposed Walt and watched him marched off to prison.

Mother and daughter aren’t happily reunited.

Instead, Jennifer sacrifices her own freedom and her ability to live normally with her daughter because she believes that’s the only way Mandy can finally be safe.

I found that incredibly sad.

But I also understood why the character did it.

The Real Case Behind the Fiction?

There’s another fascinating element to In the Best Interest of the Child.

The filmmakers maintained that it was fictional, but contemporary reporting immediately noticed striking similarities to the Elizabeth Morgan-Hilary Foretich custody case.

Morgan spent 25 months jailed for contempt after refusing to comply with an order granting her daughter’s father unsupervised visitation, while her daughter was sent into hiding. The Los Angeles Times reported that the movie’s executive producer had even met Morgan while she was imprisoned, although CBS and the producers insisted that the film was not based on her case.

I think that context makes the film even more interesting, although it’s important not to treat the movie as proof of what happened in that disputed real-life case.

Nor would I claim that one film proves that every family court—or the family court system generally—is corrupt.

But it certainly portrays a system failing a vulnerable child, and it raises uncomfortable questions about what happens when courts get these extraordinarily difficult decisions wrong.

And I’ve heard enough allegations over the years from parents who believe that neither they nor their children were properly listened to that the subject makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Whatever your wider view of family courts, one principle shouldn’t be controversial:

The welfare and safety of the child must come first.

My Verdict

In the Best Interest of the Child isn’t a perfect film.

It’s a 1990 television movie and occasionally feels like one. Even contemporary reviewers praised the performances while criticising aspects of its dramatic execution.

But the subject matter is powerful enough that I kept thinking about it several days after watching it.

Meg Tilly is excellent as a mother driven to desperation.

Marta Woodward gives an impressive and upsetting performance as Mandy.

Michael O’Keefe makes Walt deeply unsettling precisely because he doesn’t look like the stereotypical monster we might expect.

And Judge Dunham infuriated me.

Most of all, I was angry with everyone who wasn’t listening to that child or her mother.

Mandy’s behaviour is screaming that something is wrong.

Jennifer is screaming that something is wrong.

Yet somehow Jennifer becomes the person sitting in a jail cell.

The ending isn’t satisfying in the traditional sense because justice doesn’t triumph.

But Jennifer achieves the one thing that has mattered to her throughout the entire film:

Mandy is finally somewhere she believes her father cannot hurt her.

And Jennifer is prepared to pay the price for that herself.

For me, that makes In the Best Interest of the Child an upsetting, frustrating and still surprisingly thought-provoking film more than 35 years after it was made.