From the "On The Scene" Archives:

By Stephen Garrett

Audience enthusiasm for the film programs at the LAIFF usually vacillates between mild reception and calamitous applause, depending on how many of the filmmaker's friends, family, cast and crew are in attendance at a hometown film festival like this one. So genuine public interest, when it's there, is sometimes hard to parse from the overjoyed key grip watching his name appear for the first time in some credit scroll. In the case of Katherine Dieckmann's "A Good Baby," though, the mild but sustained reception it received aptly reflected the caliber of the work, as it unspooled last Saturday in Sunset Boulevard's plush Harmony Gold screening room.

There's a good heart and an even better story somewhere deep within "A Good Baby," a tender but flawed tale about a poor, young hick who finds an abandoned baby in the woods and starts caring for it as his own. The thematic strands of loneliness, loss, and family ties weave effectively throughout the story, and the slow emotional connections each of the principal characters makes with the baby are visually telling; but ultimately the film doesn't leave a lasting impression since the story itself is so simplistic.

Raymond Toker (Henry Thomas), the last remaining Toker brother since the others left town, lives in a bomb shelter next to the charred remains of his family house. Town beauty Josephine Roby (Cara Seymour) has a crush on Raymond, but he's too timid to take advantage of her advances. Besides, when he finds a blood-stained newborn baby girl while hunting in the forest, all of Raymond's attention gravitates to the infant. Then Truman Lester (David Strathairn), a salesman breezes through town to sell some goods, and appears to hold and linger over Raymond's baby just long enough to make Raymond uncomfortable. Turns out that the baby girl is more than just a passing interest and Lester soon enough grabs the baby for himself, putting the child right in the middle of harm's way as Raymond and his friends track him down.

In terms of the cast, Katherine Dieckmann ekes out shy, persuasive performances from her leads, including a forlorn intensity from Thomas and a troubled emptiness from Strathairn. Jim Denault's cinematography is appropriately rich and vibrant without overwhelming the film's small-town qualities by having overstated camerawork and lighting. But the story feels much more slight than its history suggests, since it started life as a novel by Leon Rooke. The thriller aspect of "A Good Baby" is its weakest point, although this is not to say that such plotting should be the film's strength, either -- just to say that opportunities are lost to use the thriller plotting to reveal more about the people involved. To its merit, the slow-moving tale indulges personality and character development, which admittedly delays the climax and creates a sense of anticipation about the final confrontation. But that climax is much less profound than it could be.

One recurring quality issue at this year's LAIFF is a surfeit of fair-to-good material that with rare exception is relentlessly conventional and occasionally predictable in its storytelling devices and plot twists, another reason why "A Good Baby" feels like yet another example of an endemic conservatism in the independent world that continues to shy further away from challenging material.