These are variations on motherhood's worst-case scenario: you turn your back for a moment or make, under pressure of conflicting emotions, what seems to you only a minor error in judgment, and suddenly your child is snatched from you. For Lindy Chamberlain (Meryl Streep) in A Cry in the Dark, the loss is permanent: she never sees her baby again, alive or dead. For Anna Dunlap (Diane Keaton) in The Good Mother, the outcome is not quite so cruel: she faces losing custody of her daughter Molly, but not the child's death. Yet both mothers find themselves in court, desperately defending themselves against society's determination to misunderstand their motives, to turn tormented consciences into legally guilty ones.
Ironically, Chamberlain's story, which is a true one, is infinitely more bizarre, and in the end more emotionally devastating, than Dunlap's, which is adapted from a popular novel. It was precisely because what occurred to Chamberlain one night in 1980 was so improbably eerie, so Stephen Kingish really, that she found herself convicted of murder. With her husband Michael (Sam Neill), her two sons and her nine-week-old baby Azaria, she was in a crowded campsite in the Australian outback. She put the infant to bed in a tent, returned to the barbecue. Shortly, she heard Azaria cry out and saw a wild dog, a dingo, carrying the baby off into the wilderness. A search was organized, but neither animal nor prey was ever found.
It was as if a myth had emerged from the collective unconscious, taken the form of a slavering shadow and made a murderous foray against the ordinary order of things. People simply did not want to believe it. The police, the public, the press kept trying to convert resonant mystery into conventional tabloid sordidness. The Chamberlains were devout Seventh-Day Adventists, and, since most people know little about that faith, wild rumors that it encouraged ritual murder soon surfaced. Worse, Lindy refused to play the archetypal role that this drama called for. She would not grieve hysterically for the reporters. Throughout her ordeal she was altogether too combative in her own defense, too openly contemptuous of misinformed public opinion.
A Cry in the Dark insists on cutting away from the Chamberlains' personal drama to show, efficiently and effectively, how mass journalism, ever in search of uncomplicated images, feeds the mass mind's need for simple ideas. It is also savagely critical of expert forensic witnesses in criminal cases. In short, it is a movie relentlessly true to its own belief that what is too quickly grasped may be misunderstood. Streep's performance is in that vein, awesomely tough-minded. No actress has ever played a victim more austerely. Flat-voiced, pinching off every temptation to high drama, she refuses to force this character on us. Instead, she asks us to search, as she must have had to, for the hard, pure, exemplary and not easily endearing innocence she found in Lindy Chamberlain. We respond to her art in the best way, with clear, dry eyes.