The Good Mother (1988) from Tuna and Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

My reaction to this film is confusion. Liam Neeson was showering one day when the little girl asked if she could touch his penis. Since he knew that Keaton was really into openness, he just let her. The ex-husband heard from the daughter, "Liam lets me touch it", and that's all she wrote. There was also an incident where the little girl climbed into bed with them and they made love after they thought she was asleep. Because of these incidents, the courts considered that Keaton was an unfit mother, and awarded custody to the father.

The first problem is that we don't know what to believe. The incidents happened off camera, so we are in the same position as the judge in the case, having to rely on the testimony of the two or three people who were present, and the words spoken by the little girl to the court-appointed psychologist.

Therefore, I tried to put myself in the judge's seat. If Liam is telling the truth, then it doesn't make too much difference which decision he makes. But what is Neeson is lying? What if Neeson enticed the little girl to touch him, as the ex-husband seems to believe? In this case, the judge would be endangering the child's welfare by sending her back to Keaton, because Keaton and Neeson were still together. Since the judge can't say for sure whether Neeson is telling the truth, it seems to me that he made the right decision. The courts are entrusted with the welfare of the child. Sending the child to the father seems completely risk-free in either case. Sending the child to the mother could be a disaster because she is still with Neeson, and Neeson might be lying.

Tough call, but the judge did what he had to do to protect the child.

Going one step further, neither Neeson nor Keaton denied that they did make love with the little girl in the bed, even though we didn't see this or even suspect it. I don't know how modern psychologists feel about this, but everybody in the movie seemed to think it was reckless. Since we didn't see the act, it's hard to form an opinion. If they were bouncin' around like crazy, yelling obscenities, and stuff like "fuck my asshole, and fuck it hard" - well, then that was reckless and abusive to the child. If they were quietly rubbing together in the dark under the covers, maybe I would have a different opinion. Like the judge, I know nothing, I saw nothing, so I'm thinking maybe they were going nuts with advanced S&M practices with the little kid in the bed, in which case the right decision would be to send the kid back to the father.

I guess. You see there is another problem. I don't know what professional child psychologists say about all this.

Also, I don't know much about what is and isn't harmful to do in from of a kid, so it would have been helpful to have multiple psychologists testify on this score. The judge could have asked - "well, what if they were sportfuckin' in the same bed - is that a case of child abuse?' - "well, what if they were rubbing away noiselessly, would that be so bad? - except for the very rich, haven't most people made love with their children in the same room since the origins of homo sapiens?" "What about this touching thing? Couldn't that be justified on the basis of developing healthy openness?" This is pretty technical stuff, really, and I don't know the answers. The judge should have asked these questions to professionals, and I should have been able to hear the answers, but no dice.

So we don't know what happened, and even if we did, we don't know whether it was bad or not. The movie keeps us at such an emotional distance that we just don't know what to think. At the end of this film, I didn't know what Keaton and Neeson actually did. I didn't know what the legal system considers inappropriate. I didn't know what psychologists consider inappropriate. Considering that I was completely in the dark on all counts, I had no P.O.V., and absolutely no emotional identification with the characters. I didn't care what happened to any of them.