Ages ago, I had seen this movie probably just once on a network broadcast. Back in the day (not sure about now) they would have these specials at night from time to time, made for TV movies, usually a dramatization of an issue plaguing society. A Long Way Home 1981 focuses on a few issues around that time namely foster care, children abandonment and parental irresponsibility. The way this movie was shot didn’t go very deep into any one issue and used those issues to tell the story of how the oldest sibling sought to locate his two younger siblings. I managed to find a very rough copy but as someone who has been searching for all things nostalgic, I was happy to finally have viewed this movie once again.
The reason why this movie stands out to me are how a few key scenes had been burned into my memory. I suppose when you’re young and you see certain things that you can relate to, you might end up remembering those things for the rest of your life. But before I hone in on those particular scenes, let me outline the plot.
The movie starts off by introducing us to a newly hired counselor who works for a foster care service. The manager of the facilities comments that the woman (Lilian) is a little older than the normal hire but she replies that she had waited until her own children had gone off to school. We don’t get much more background on her at the moment but the key thing to note here is how much younger she appears as this movie moves through numerous years.
The manager of the facilities describes the plight of a case that Lilian is assigned to where they have thre abandoned children in which the oldest acts as an authoritarian replacement for the missing father. Small touches are shown where we see some of the psychological plight these children have such as drawings of what they imagine a family is. In one image, we only see three people with the center person being the largest figure representing Donald, who is the oldest among the three.
Taking a step back, we get a little background on how the agency discovers the children. Here, prior to them arriving at the center, the three would pile up in the backseat of a beat up vehicle with their actual parents, whose first names and occupations are unknown. The narrator callously placates their situation as being common over out in Florida (of all places!) where apparently it’s not just them but a social symptom. The kids pretty much have filthy faces and we barely can see the father and mother except through small hints from mirrors, which I presume are the only images the kids can witness of the adults while in the backseat.
At some point, the parents manage to “rent” out a derelict home and eventually just permanently leave the kids to survive on their own. And for the most part that’s the last we’d hear of the two parents (well the father but we’ll come back to the mother later on). From there on out it’s Donald, the eldest, who takes on the responsibility of caring for his two younger siblings. Now, before I get further into the plot, this is where most of my memory sticks out in terms of what drew me originally to this movie.
First, the images of the kids sitting in the back of the car with the father figure passing them packages of chips (or whatever) that he’d pick up at some gas station. Then there was the girl brushing her teeth with her finger and later the kids eating cereal with a milk-water product. Obviously, no child should ever have to endure such conditions but the squalor seemed pretty unbelievable. Honestly, if you take away the drama and overall depressing mood of this movie, the images they portrayed of these kids were akin to the home Beavis and Butthead lived in. In fact, I don’t even know how they managed to stay in that home because there certainly was no way they could pay. But watching this at this juncture in my life, it’s easy, especially as a writer and someone who realizes how more modern shows tend to do a better job filling in details like that, to criticize the way things are glossed over in the movie.
At any rate, the main way they are able to survive at all is through Donald’s neighborhood thieving. He goes around to a local gas station to pick up chips or grabs milk when the local milk man shows up (remember those???). Honestly, if you eliminated the sister and just had the two brothers eating nachos, I would almost say these scenes could’ve inspired Mike Judge. That said, none of this is funny. It’s actually quite sad and it makes you wonder why the parents had these kids in the first place (we may answer this later). Also, this partly reminds me of this one Highway to Heaven episode where this homeless kid named Arnie would go to the local liquor store to steal cat food or bread. Sadly, America still hasn’t figured out how to deal with the homeless issue but these days I can’t help but think how this could be possible because of digital cameras. Or at least it’s a hundred times more difficult. Again, more social commentary later.
Anyway, Donald gets followed by some police, who so happen to be on patrol in that neighborhood. They believe they have uncovered the neighborhood thief and decide to pursue him. They follow the kid to his home and even enter without a permit. I don’t know what the exact rules were in those days but I have a feeling that you still would need a permit to do what those police did. More than that, if that happened today, the police would probably just shoot especially in Florida where I presume the kids were originally discovered. On top of that, you would think that in such an impoverished neighborhood (and I can justify this because of how the manager of the foster home facilities even described the home being in a near condemned state), the police should probably be chasing the parents or people like their parents if this situation was as common as the manager had described. But you get the point on why this was frustrating to watch.
Fast forward a little bit we go to the foster care and the manager concludes that the three need to be split because most adoptive parents don’t want to accept the responsibilities for more than one child. So he wants to proceed as “easily” as can be. For the next part, the manager and Lilian effectively, uh, kidnap the two younger siblings while they’re sleeping and place them into the manager’s car. Donald wakes up and decides to chase after his siblings while the manager drives off. Imagine the plot twist if Donald was Captain America or the T-1000 from the Terminator 2. Now, that would’ve been funny as fuck. Slightly modified note here. Originally, I thought that the manager grabbed the kids while they were napping because Lilian had been introduced while the three were playing and awake. But time got distorted somehow in the story where they swapped to the morning even though it was supposed to be Lilian’s first day. Again, details that are missing….
Obviously, the manager gets away with the two kids (how any of this is justified is pretty mind blowing) and we get to fast forward even more. The next time we see Donald, he’s a teenager in his last year at high school. He’s on the borderline of becoming an adult (5 months out) and he tries to contact the agency again to see if he can get more information on his siblings. Because he’s not a legal adult, he can’t receive any more information legally. So here’s where I think the real start of the meat of the matter is in terms of showing the legal bureaucracy. Effectively, Donald is dicked around for quite a while before he can legally contact his own brother and sister or even the foster care families, so this part is where I think the show tries to make some sort of a statement because I do feel frustrated for the guy.
Back at his foster home, we see a more or less loving family that had adopted him but Donald remains aloof. He has an adopted sister too and they bond a bit because he feels sympathetic towards her own case. The father tries to be a nice guy but he’s in this strange state as a character. The only thing we get about him is that he didn’t want to deal with diapers, which is why he wanted to adopt. Now, I can accept that to a degree but his character is kinda bipolar in a way. Also, you have the wife who is quite kind but she plays a very subservient type that has almost no input. With Donald, his main quality is that he’s difficult which is understandable because of his traumatic situation. However, we don’t get a great deal of depth with him in terms of exploring his trauma outside of bizarre flashbacks (I wish they used the Shaw Brothers/Chang Cheh sepia colored flashback style just for giggles). Either way, the main reason he seems to be living is to reunite with his two siblings.
That said, he acts very responsible and mature for someone at that age especially as one who had to endure that level of neglect early on. Presumably, a lot of that was through how he would take care of his younger siblings. But here’s where it again gets muddy for me. From what it sounds, the siblings were found after 4-5 weeks (a month or so) of being abandoned. Now, sure Donald most likely was the primary care giver in the backseat of that beat up car, but one month of being the father role shouldn’t affect him that badly. Also, they never go into detail how long they were under the agency’s roof. I imagine it wasn’t long though. His siblings were younger and they did show how he would care for them in the car or carefully watching over during pit stops. Yet we don’t learn how long his family had been like that as we only pick up the story when he was roughly 7 years of age.
Gradually, Donald continues to persist in searching for his siblings. He charges the family phone line a lot in making various attempts to locate them. His foster father sees the bill and they have an argument that effectively spells the end of Donald living with his foster family. Now, here’s where I’m unsure how the foster system works but Donald leaves prior to reaching 18 years of age. And while the father doesn’t fight him on the matter, there should have been some sort of legal repercussions one would think. The only thing I know for certain is that once Donald reaches the age of 18, the foster family could just kick him out. So I don’t know if the foster system checks on those things prior to when someone hits 18. I mean that to me seems like negligence.
Anyway, Donald leaves and goes to live with a friend. The foster mother does provide a little extra cash to help Donald survive, for which Donald is very reluctant to take. Eventually, Donald gets his own place and we encounter the most out of place character in the movie: Rose. Rose becomes Donald’s girlfriend and eventually wife. She’s such an odd character not because there’s no reason for Donald not to get involved with someone but because she just decides to take him because “he appears mature.” Then when he’s having thoughts about marrying her, she freaks out a little later and suddenly accepts afterward. The character is so out of place to me because she doesn’t really add much to the story. The only part is where she gives a suggestion to Donald about how he can possibly find his sister or something like that. But my pet peeve here is that she mostly felt like a waste of time because they don’t give her much to develop upon.
Eventually, it’s graduation time for Donald and he’s 18. So his parents go to his graduation ceremony and he’s not present. Instead, he’s working so they figure to interrupt him. He does some landscaping job and his foster father hands him his diploma. I guess this scene is to add some sort of closure for the foster parents with Donald. But Donald is such a distant character whose sole motivation has been to find his two siblings that this sidetrack added nothing to the story. Also, for whatever reason Donald tells his foster father to keep the diploma. You know sometimes those things come in handy for paperwork. Not a very bright guy is this Donald.
We get back to the main issue of his search for his siblings. Once again, despite him being 18, his two siblings aren’t so their foster parents won’t release any information back to Donald (what a bunch of assholes!). So Donald has to wait even longer before he can proceed. It’s more of this back and forth with the counselor and at a certain point she decides to help Donald. We don’t get a clear reason what makes her change her mind, we’re just shown (as the old manager of the facilities is about to retire) how he casually received some information on Donald’s siblings. Then supposedly out of the generosity of her heart, she decides to help Donald. I mean, I get that a scenario could pop up like that but you would think that Lilian would have to make exceptions in many cases. There’s nothing special about Donald’s case given how many years have passed since she started and how many cases she probably had dealt with since that time. The only thing we know about Donald’s case is that he doesn’t give up his pursuit of his siblings. Maybe she got tired of fighting with him.
But the important aspect is that Lilian managed to find information about the sister, Carolyn. So summoning Donald one evening Lilian tries to get the air force (whom Carolyn apparently worked for at some point) to call Donald at the facilities. They wait around to receive the call only to be disappointed that Carolyn rejected the call. So Donald is back to square one.
He ends up trying to look for his brother instead (this might’ve been a suggestion by Donald’s wife/girlfriend). Before that though, we get a little more background on the mother (remember I mentioned that). He was able to get the police statement about his parents because they had put a trace on the parents for abandoning the children. The father seemed to vanish but the mother was picked up by police in Washington. We learn the mother’s true occupation: prostitution (they show the mother again in the mirror putting lipstick on). Lilian tells Donald that he shouldn’t insist on pursuing the case because he would just continue to get hurt. Oddly, Donald’s rather stony demeanor does not hint at him showing any emotion on discovering what his mother had done for a job. But I actually accurately had guessed this just before Lilian uttered the exact word. I mean, it’s not like there were remote dev jobs back then!
I wanted to interject another thing here in that his mother having the occupation as a prostitute, while kinda obvious from some signs, actually doesn’t make a lot of sense in the scheme of things. What did his biological father do then? Was he her pimp? I doubt he was some drug dealer just because they probably would’ve been balling a bit better. I do think the mother being a prostitute seems like a way to shift the blame of the situation on women in an indirect way. I mean, wouldn’t the father be angry that the mother was selling herself? Why bother staying in that situation driving from place to place and lugging three kids around for 7 years? There’s just details in this story that don’t add up but other aspects have a weird social slant that don’t work well at the end of the day.
Anyway, Donald goes after David with Lilian’s aid. Both David and Carolyn had run away a few times during the course of the show and Donald concludes that they probably were searching for him (btw this NEVER was confirmed but it is an interesting common personality trait I’ve heard in foster children who are siblings). David ended up being adopted by rich parents but ran away at some point which prevented the agency from locating his exact whereabouts. Nonetheless, Lilian goes to the home that David had been living in only to discover that it was on sale. So she locates another place where some random store clerk somehow knew one of the parents and reveals David’s name, occupation and location.
Lilian continues hunting David down where she find he’s working from his own business selling vacuums. She sets up a meeting with Donald at Donald’s home. Rose goes out wanting the two brothers to have their moment together. After she leaves, David nervously approaches the home. As the two brothers greet each other, there’s a lot of awkward conversation that occurs.
Pause here. I had a LOT of issues with how this part was done. The dialog and initial meeting were incredibly awkward and borderline awful. At one point, the two started to argue where Donald would say he was just a child and David had to swallow the reality. I guess the writers were trying to go for some artificial tension where maybe both had unsaid resentment for leaving one another. But given how badly Donald was trying to find his siblings, I thought there should have been a lot more emotional connection between the two. Eventually, they DO hug but I was expecting both to break down in tears considering how close they supposedly were as well as Donald’s life long quest of reconnecting with his siblings.
That leaves their sister and we’re running out of time. So Lilian reveals that Carolyn did not realize her last name was actually Branch and did not recognize Donald’s full name when she was contacted. But she, of course, knew Donald and finally made the connection and wanted to meet up with them. First, she calls them and Donald says that they’re going to fly THAT VERY NIGHT to meet with her. Oh god my head hurts….I mean they didn’t even have Expedia back then….but again we’re running crucially low on time.
So they get to some airport, wherever the air force base where Carolyn lives with her husband on the border of. It’s just the two brothers and Rose. They don’t see Carolyn (which would be damn hard to do considering they’re all years apart since last seeing one another) so they go off in different directions with Donald being impatient and figuring on making a call to try and reach her (thank god we have mobile devices now! Can you imagine the money they’d all save with a simple Zoom or Google Meet video chat?)
Anyway, as Donald is making that call, he sees his brother drinking some milk which causes another bizarre, oddly placed flashback that really had nothing to do with the plot than some nostalgic factor for him. Then some random little girl starts asking strangers going through the tunnel if they’re her uncle Donald (mind you she’s on her own). Donald hears the little girl and picks her up. Some woman in the distance sees her kid being picked up by a total stranger (yeah, we all trusted each other like this back in the day) and walks up to see who it is. It’s none other than the dude from Taps!
Okay, not the same guy from Taps just the actor. But they run to meet each other around the bend. We see some guy in a uniform who probably is the woman’s husband and Donald gets to hug his sister. David joins them and it’s a bit of a tear jerker except that this shit ends quite abruptly with Donald announcing, “I’m home.” Or something like that.
Man, this movie really ended up being all over the place. That’s the only way I can describe it now that I’ve watched it from front to back. I feel that there’s an anger that wants to be directed at the social welfare system but that anger ends up dying in the last 10-20 minutes because the writers are rushing to finish up the story. The story really is about Donald rather than the system because he’s the only one that really was given any kind of motivation and development as a character. Everyone else acts as an accessory to him in reaching his goal.
The part with David felt as though there needed to be more because of how they were cut from each others’ lives. There’s some small social commentary about David running away from his rich foster parents because the mother ended up being an alcoholic abusive drunk once the father died. So in that sense, it’s a case where the adopted kid has no choice in the matter in terms of who picks that person up. But like other things in this movie, that little but pertinent detail ends up being another bit that gets quickly swept under the rug. It’s almost as bad as the “I have breast cancer” line from The Room, if not worse just because David’s situation feels trivialized.
With Carolyn, everything ends so abruptly. The three get reunited but there’s no real payoff besides the hug. We don’t get to hear her story or the three siblings sharing their collective memories. She’s barely given any lines. Donald’s foster sister receives more development than the older Carolyn. It’s kinda sad too because all that trouble Donald goes through to reunite with David and Carolyn gets roughly a minute of screen time. It feels like another 30 minutes should have been tacked on to develop the three a little better.
Then what happens with Lilian? Despite all the hassle she goes through, she just disappears for the finale. Although she’s a bit of a bitch at the beginning, she ends up becoming the real hero in the story because of how she went out of her way to help Donald. We did get to learn she was divorced and had children but there’s not a lot else. I suppose those tiny details are what we’re lead to believe are the things motivating her to take this kind of BS job. But considering all the rules she must obey, doesn’t that mean the way she ends up helping Donald risks her job?
That’s why I said this movie ends up going in all types of directions. There’s the subplot with Rose that doesn’t add much except show that Donald hates being abandoned. She doesn’t get much of a personality outside of being a sheer support device for Donald’s trauma. Or when she becomes indecisive about Donald’s initial marriage proposal then suddenly agreeing out of nowhere, that whole situation made no sense. She never explains why she would or wouldn’t want to marry Donald. In fact, outside of the maturity factor, she just straight out accepts Donald when he asks her to go out with him. I would believe Anakin turning to the Dark Side as fast as he did more than Rose unquestioningly going out with Donald in a single line.
But that’s the thing with this movie. Things just would move from point A to point B without much transition. You’re just traveling along and there’s not a lot of thought put in these things. It is a TV movie but I can’t tell what the actual message was supposed to be. Don’t give up? Foster institutions suck? Parents should be more responsible?
It’s really hard to tell because there’s no true focus. There isn’t enough anger or detail about where the foster agency goes wrong nor what the answer should be. It’s like someone just hung out by a road and peeped into every car that passed him or her and decided, “Yup, this is the problem with these families in America.” Or they blamed prostitution (which wasn’t so subtly hinted how the three siblings were conceived).
Then you have the missing father figure. We have no idea what that person is just an anonymous character. His only personality trait is that he wasn’t there. One thing that really bothered me about that whole thing is that the parents managed to raise three kids even to their respective ages. Donald made it to 7 apparently. They weren’t necessarily physically abused outside of undernourishment that we could tell. I don’t understand why the parents didn’t try abandoning Donald the moment he was born. Not to be cruel but if the mom had the child because she was a hooker with that father, then why not just leave Donald in some garbage can after he was born? Why have two more kids and live in some beat up car driving up and down a road?
I’m sure some of the story was just random things the writers might’ve discovered from things they’ve read or heard about to portray a more “realistic” setting. It’s just that to me at least there’s so many things that made no sense once you deconstructed them that the story felt more frustrating to watch, especially these days.
But one reason I’m harping so much on the issues presented here is that I don’t really see that much has changed in terms of similar problems. We still have very irresponsible parents. We still have problems with foster care. We still have abusive adoptive families. This show changed nothing.
I guess the thing to me is that I still feel for kids in those conditions. I think the little chips meals or cereal with water-milk make me consider how bad living conditions can be for some. The exception is that I doubt people can even afford those things anymore if they were in the same predicament.
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