Midnight Bayou (2009) (TV)

User Rating:

5.2/10   

Director:

Ralph Hemecker

Writers (WGA):

Stephen Tolkin (teleplay)
Nora Roberts (novel)

Release Date:

28 March 2009 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Mystery | Romance

Plot Keywords:

Reincarnation | Paranormal | Date | Vision | Grandmother Granddaughter Relationship

Cast

Jerry O'Connell	...	Declan Fitzpatrick
Lauren Stamile	...	Lena Simone
Isabella Hofmann	...	Lilibeth Simone
Alan Ritchson	...	Lucian Manet
Faye Dunaway	...	Odette Simone
Ashley LeConte Campbell	...	Josephine Manet
Bianca Malino	...	Abigail Manet
Alejandro Rose-Garcia	...	Julian Manet
Chris Lindsay	...	Remy
Ciera Payton	...	Effie
Shawn Carter Peterson	...	Jack Tripadoe
Stephanie Honore	...	Maid #2
John McConnell	...	Oscar
David Jensen	...	Realtor
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Lisa Mackel Smith	...	Ballroom Dancer

Also Known As:

Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou (USA) (complete title)

Runtime:

USA:120 min (with commercials)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.78 : 1

Certification:

USA:TV-14 | UK:15 (DVD rating)

Filming Locations:

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Company:

Stephanie Germain Productions

The Wheel Turns

***SPOILERS*** Ghost story by Nora Roberts about the deep south that covers some 120 years and at least four generations of the New Oleans Manet family.

It's when young collage student Declan Fitzpartrick, celebrating Fat Tuesday, saw this ghostly young woman outside Manet Hall that he was determined in buying the long deserted mansion. Some eight years later and now having a very successful law practice in Boston Declan was now able to buy his dream house feeling that he had some strange and unearthly connection to it. Declan, in hiding his real intentions, plans on using it a law center for the local's in the area. It's then that Declan meets Lina Simone who's descendants once owned Manet Hall and whom he's connected to through the distant past-reincarnation-in ways he, who doesn't believe in the supernatural, could never have imagine!

The supernatural angle in the movie is a bit hard to follow in that were given two entirely different stories to what happened with Lina's great great great grandfather Lucian in the abandonment of him and is infant daughter by his wife, Lina's great great great grandmother, the former Manet Hall maid Abigail. We get most of this confusing story from Lina's Grandma Odette who seems to have supernatural powers herself in her knowing things, especially about Declan, that she has no way of coming up with.

The movie,almost by accident, really starts to heat up when Lina's junkie mom Marie Rose shows up from Huston needing quick cash, $10,000.00, to pay off her drug suppliers back in Texas. Trying to blackmail Declan, for her drug money, who has since fallen in love with her daughter-Lina-Marie Rose ends up getting into even deeper trouble, with the local sheriff, then she ever was with the drug dealers back in the Lone Star State. It's Marie Rose guilt, that lead to her drug addiction, which in fact activated the strange events that happened over 100 years ago leading to Abigail's mysterious disappearance.

What really saves the movie is the events that happened back then in the late 1890's, at Manet Hall, that somehow found their way back to the present-2009-with both Declan and Lina.****SPOILER ALERT****It's not only the difference between some 120 years but the reality in what happened back then as well as the change of identities of the major characters in the film that set up the movies unexpected, to everyone involved, as well as surprise ending!

I may take an unlimited amount of time but the "Wheel of Life"-Reincarnation- eventually makes amends for the mistakes made by those of us,all of humanity, who are art of it. Even if it in the end it takes as much as a dozen lifetimes for it to eventually correct them!