Film: Any Day Now
Director: Travis Fine
TOWERS: 4/5
All things are created equal –- it’s a statement that truly has no place in a film that tells the true story of a couple in Los Angeles, California that works to adopt a child in the late 1970s.
Adoption, as a process in America, dates back with official state law as far back as 1851. It’s a process that has been refined over decades and, in turn, should make adopting a child easy to achieve for every proven couple in front of a court of law. But what if this process involves race where the child’s race differs from the prospective parents which could end up being confusing for the child? No problem — covered as of 1948. What if the child is from another country? Interesting — this is finding its way through the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 as we write.
Hold up, what if the child is a mentally handicapped teenager? Add what if the parents are two concerned, attentive adults that just happen to be homosexual?
Therein lies the heart of a film that works to showcase just how hard the fight for rights has been for adoption within the LGBTIQ community since civil uprisings in the United States started with movements like Stonewall in 1969.
“Any Day Now” recounts the uphill battle that happened over the course of two years when a couple from West Hollywood in Los Angeles, California works to bring a 14-year-old teen from the broken home of a incarcerated, drug-addled mother (played unflinchingly by “The Killing” television actress Jamie Anne Allman) into theirs.
The teen in question, Marco (Isaac Leyva in his first acting role), bookends the film with his aimless exploration of Los Angeles, doll in hand, looking for his home, which it seems he will never find.
West Hollywood throughout the “disco era” was a Petri dish. It was a hub of experimentation, connection and definition. Somehow in the midst of it all, the couple (played with complete investment from veteran stage and screen actor Alan Cumming and from “Raising Hope,” Garret Dillahunt) find each other and this child through a rapid-fire scenario of circumstances that beg the question: what is the right situation for a child?
You will ask yourself the same question as Rudy (Cumming) and Paul (Dillahunt) weave their way through the judicial system – and each other – as they try to bring this child into their newly found relationship and into what they feel is the best setting for this misplaced part of “the system.”
A heartbreaking scene finds Marco realizing for the first time that his home could in all actuality be with this newfound pair of parents as he exclaims in tears, “I’m excited” — something the teen hasn’t been able to feel in some time — and it’s something that everyone within the scene (and in the seats of the theater) understands and also feels within the first interaction between them.
So what happens? Does it all work out? Well, it depends on what you gather from the ending of the film. It’s a hard, uneven line between telling a story and properly marking a part of history that even now, we seem to not understand fully.
“Any Day Now” will have you questioning what is “right” and what can make a family part of the true “American Dream.”
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