Bits and pieces of this film by director Barbet Schroeder Before and After are all I had seen before I watched the film from start to finish tonight, maybe because it never seemed like something that was very much worthy to stick to for long on TV. Now after, it's never quite as successful as it aspires to almost in spite of what the cast is up to deliver. But what makes the film fall apart even when it reaches for grounded, dark family drama, is that there is an inherent 'message' being pushed with the material, and there is more potential for the dynamics of these characters than is mined. In fact, this could have been a very good film, bordering on excellent, if all the expectations that could come with a 'movie' version of such a realistic story had been subverted. As it is, Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, and Edward Furlong do what they can with characters that border between two and two and a half dimensional characters (if that makes sense). They're all extremely competent and put power where it's needed in scenes. But the whole lot of it almost seems to a kind of 'meh' point, like an episode of Law and Order that goes more for the upper-middle class decay than the interest in the case itself of the murder committed by the teenage Furlong. No one is necessarily a 'bad' character, which ironically places some of what ends up occurring on screen after the first hour being bland and predictable. There are maybe two or three really well-done scenes in the whole film (i.e. when Neeson and Streep first visit Furlong in jail, with an impeccable silence from the child to the emotional parents), floating amid what could just as well be a TV movie trumped for Hollywood. It's also sad to report that a supporting actor like Alfred Molina is almost misused, which rarely every happens with his character-actor parts; compared to his best roles in other indie and blockbuster films the quality of 'ah, Molina's in this' lasts for maybe three minutes. Worth watching maybe once, though if you don't stick through it to the end it's not the end of the world- probably one of Shroeder's lesser films.