The film was Missing at 17, a surprisingly good effort from Lifetime’s number one auteur, writer Christine Conradt, and her frequent collaborator, director Doug Campbell. It begins with a singularly chilling scene in which Shannon White (Tricia O’Kelly) is running through the mean streets of Los Angeles searching for her missing 17-year-old daughter Candace (Ayla Kell, top-billed). She runs into a homeless person who keeps repeating the name “Candace” after hearing Shannon call it, and when she asks him if he’s seen her, he says, “She rode off on a white horse.” Then she encounters a white … no, not a horse, but a van, dumping a blue body bag onto a vacant lot. She charges over to the bag as soon as they drive off, and opens it to find a young woman inside. The opening is a bit of a cheat because later we see the same sequence and find it was only a nightmare Shannon had, but in the meantime the scene-setting continues, we get a title reading, “Two days earlier” (fortunately it’s just days and not weeks, months or even years as in some of Lifetime’s other movies, including ones scripted by Conradt), and a startling confrontation between mother and daughter that shows us just why Candace ran away. It seems that a week before Candace’s boyfriend had dumped her — and Candace was so alienated from her mom already that she told her dad (who in the meantime had divorced mom and moved from L.A. to San Diego — it’s not that far but Candace treats it about the same as if he’d gone to New York!) but not her mom — but what really precipitated her running away was a lecture by her biology teacher. The teacher was explaining Mendel’s laws of heredity and noting that, because the gene for blue eyes is recessive, two blue-eyed parents can’t conceive a brown-eyed child. “That’s impossible,” says Candace, offering herself — the brown-eyed daughter of a blue-eyed man and woman — as a counter-example.
The
teacher disagrees, of course, and one of the boys in class heckles Candace and
says she must have been adopted. Then she goes home and, after an initial
attempt to evade the conversation, mom confesses to Candace that she was adopted — it turns out later that she and her
husband were so anxious to become parents they didn’t want to play the usual
game of sexual roulette and wait both for however long it took them to conceive
plus nine months after that, though eventually they had their own natural
child, Candace’s brother Andrew (Jacob Hopkins) — and Candace takes that as
explanation for all the tensions
that have existed between her and mom for as long as she can remember, and
takes off. She makes it as far as the mean streets, where she’s picked up by a
hot young man named Toby (Ben Gavin), who’s a hunk to die for so we know he’s up to no good. Indeed, given the current
attention to human trafficking our immediate suspicion is that he’s going to
take her to his place, seduce her and ultimately pimp her out — though he’s got
one point of difference from the average movie pimp: he’s white, and though
there are undoubtedly real-life white guys seducing underage runaway girls and
turning them out as hookers, the people who do this sort of thing in movies always seem to be Black or Latino. It turns out that he and
his cousin/roommate Keenan (Jonathan Camp) are running their place as a
continual party house — indeed, when Toby first brings Candace to his place
there are so many young horny guys around my first thought was they were going
to gang-rape Candace and I found myself muttering under my breath, “Please,
Christine, don’t do that to her!” She didn’t, and instead of being a pimp
Toby turns out to be involved in some other, less sex-oriented forms of
villainy, from loan-sharking to stealing motorcycles (we see him carefully
filing off the serial number of one of them and reselling it) and ultimately
planning some sort of robbery that, since the target building is in a grungy
neighborhood and is covered in graffiti, is obviously aimed at stealing either
drugs or drug money.
While all this is going on, Shannon is searching for
Candace and Candace borrows $1,000 from Toby and uses it to hire private
detective Mike Foster (Gary Hudson) — who, though no Humphrey Bogart, Dick
Powell or Robert Mitchum, is at least personable and far less grungy than the
overweight slobs private eyes are usually depicted as in Conradt’s films.
Naturally, she wants Foster to trace her birth mother, and though he’s unable
to locate an address for her he does
find her brother, Vance (Micah Alberti, who for once in a Lifetime movie is a
hot young man actually playing a sympathetic character!), and it turns out
mother is a hopeless alcoholic who got thrown out of her own place and moved in
with him — a traumatic experience for him since he kept getting called away
from work (and losing money thereby) to pick her up from one gutter
(metaphorical or, sometimes, literal) or another. Before she and we find her
brother, however, Candace actually is located by her mom — and her dad, who has
come down from San Diego to help the search and be there if and when she
returns — only, in a marked departure from Conradt’s usual formulae, instead of
being sympathetic they start chewing her out and get so nasty and punitive
towards her she runs away again and
heads for the waiting arms of Toby. Though a bit too pat in its plot resolution
(albeit Conradt throws us another welcome emotional curveball when Candace’s
real mom says that now that she’s in touch with her daughter she’s going to go
into rehab and stop drinking — and instead of being supportive, Vance chews her
out, understandably jealous that she wasn’t willing to get sober for him but she is for a daughter she gave up at birth and
has just met, just like a real person and unlike a TV character), Missing at 17 is actually quite good drama, with enough emotional
truth that the thriller bits involving Toby and Keenan seem intrusive, though
there’s a moving and genuinely tragic ending in which the drug dealer Toby and
Keenan tried to steal from traces them, shoots both of them, and Candace,
genuinely in love with Toby, cradles his body and tries to revive him as he
dies.
It’s a measure of the unusual emotional complexity (at least for a
Christine Conradt script) of this production that we genuinely feel for Candace
losing her first real love (we previously got to meet her former boyfriend and
it’s clear there was nothing serious on either side of that relationship) even though if he had
survived he’d only have been arrested for murder (since Keenan had killed the
other drug dealer they were ripping off and under California law anyone
involved in a crime that includes murder is equally guilty of murder — some
states make distinctions between the actual shooter and the other crooks who
are literally or figuratively along for the ride, but ours doesn’t) and the
long-term impact on her psyche over having fallen for such a rotter would be
even worse. As it is, for some reason only Christine Conradt could understand,
the really bad drug guy doesn’t
kill Candace when he has the chance — given her usual predilections, one would
expect him to be just about to fire at her when the cops would show up and take
him out — so she lives to ID him
in a lineup. This time her parents take a more sympathetic and sensible line towards
her, and the final scene takes place at Candace’s birthday party, where her
birth mother shows up with a crude cake she’s baked her — an indication that
the awkward work of healing this family’s wounds is about to start in earnest. Missing
at 17 has its share of awkwardnesses and
fall-backs to Conradt’s typical plot devices, but overall it’s a surprisingly
honest story despite its lapses into melodrama in the whole two-crooks plot
line — and a meeting between Candace and her brother Vance that gets so emotional and seems so sexually charged I half
expected him to say to her, “I’d like to take you to see my favorite opera — Die
Walküre.”
