D: Brad Marlowe; with Sommer Knight, Brandon Hiott, Robert Schramm, David King.
Winner of the festival’s Best Feature Film honors, Wednesday’s Child is a sentimental fable about a modern Boo Radley and the troubled teens who intrude into his solipsistic world. After decades spent holed up alone in his house, the subject of local legend and neighborhood pranks, Nathan makes slow and cautious friends with his new neighbors, youngster Billy and his vampy troublemaker of a sister, Joanne (Sommer Knight of MTV’s Undressed). Both misunderstood outcasts, Joanne and Nathan each shepherd the other into rediscovering a forgotten part of their nature, although it ushers about a tragic, somewhat oblique, ending. Writer/director Marlowe has his heart in the right place, although the evocative narration which bookends the film is replaced with far more mundane dialogue and simplistic characterization. It’s a little too much sap and sunshine, but the film is nicely shot, and like Atticus Finch, gently and smartly reminds us never to judge a man till we’ve walked in his shoes.
This article appears in October 15 • 1999.