Not Without My Daughter

Starring: Sally Field

Directed by: Brian Gilbert

RS: Not Rated

1990 Drama

Not Without My Daughter

597 2-7-91
There's something terribly wrong when a harrowing true story reaches the screen and feels false in every particular. This film is based on a book by Betty Mahmoody (with William Hoffer), an American housewife who risked torture and death to escape from Iran with her young daughter, Mahtob, in 1986. Betty had been reluctant to leave her Michigan home eighteen months earlier when her husband, Moody, an Iranian doctor who had lived and practiced in America for twenty years, wanted to return to Iran to see his family. The shah's fall and the rise of Khomeini made the situation perilous. In Iran, Betty watched in horror as her caring husband was imbued with a religious fanaticism that turned him into an abusive monster. He demanded that his family remain in Iran; Betty had to engineer her own escape. Today she is an advisor to the State Department on the plight of American women and children held against their will in foreign countries.

In light of the Persian Gulf crisis, the story is highly topical. But as adapted by TV writer David Rintels and directed by Brian Gilbert (Vice Versa), it is also hysterically overdramatized. The film (shot in Israel) plays like a feminist nightmare on the order of Rosemary's Baby.

As Betty, Sally Field is aflutter with suspicion from the top. The swarthy Moody -- British actor Alfred Molina -- is already a devil for asking her to leave home. In Iran, Betty and Mahtob (Sheila Rosenthal) must wear a traditional hood (chador) to mark them as chattel. The subjugation of women in Iran is a brutal fact that the film exploits without probing.

Field, as usual when she puts no lid on sniffling, suffering and enduring, is unbearable. At the end, Gilbert films mother and child against the American flag. They might be models for a see what you get when you leave home poster. The movie is a model for what you get when you substitute melodrama for complexity. Betty Mahmoody deserved better.