A Long Way Home [DVD]

This is a good film about the dilema faced by a family about a father/husband who abused his daughter and whether to allow him to come back and live with them.

**SPOILERS** This film was originally titled "Aftermath - A long way home" and it deals with the consequences of sexual abuse within a family unit. Meredith Baxter plays Carol, a woman who is allowing her husband, Jack, back into the family home despite the fact that he has been sexually abusing their fourteen year old daughter. His return is strictly supervised and the family have to visit a therapist. Jack isn't allowed upstairs and the film does a sensitive job of demonstrating how impossible the situation really is.The abused daughter, Tess, is understandably frightened that the abuse will reoccur.She is awkward and timid around her father. The abuse was only discovered when Carol walked into her daughter's bedroom one night and witnessed what her husband was doing. . I think that many parents would agree with me when I say that I wouldn't put my child under that sort of strain. No child should go to bed worrying that their father is going to rape them during the night. I also felt sorry for Tess's younger brother who had to sit in on the therapy sessions listening to what his father had done.The sub-plot to is Tess's own back story. We discover that she was sent to boarding school as a child by her ambitious and distant mother. Her father is never mentioned and she has no photographs of him. Despite their difficult relationship, Tess now works for her mother in an art gallery. Although she knows it is wrong, Carol partly blames her daughter for the abuse. She wonders if Tess would have spoken out had the abuse not been discovered, she begins to have panic attacks..Towards the end of the film we discover that both Jack and Tess were abused by their own fathers. Carol's abuse was almost identical to Tess's. Watching the film it seems that almost all men are child abusers. I found this a little far fetched and simplistic. How does a family break the cycle? Will their son grow up to abuse his own child? How will Tess ever be able to trust men when her father and both her grandfathers were paedophiles?Apart from the ending I thought this was a well acted and thought-provoking film that dealt with a taboo subject realistically and sensitively.

ok

any film with meredith baxter is usually well worth watching, this no exception, very emotional and heart rendering.

The dvd was very good